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Meet The Partisans Who Wove the Censorship Complex’s Vast and Tangled Web

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 28, 2023

Yoel Roth at congressional hearing — While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

While the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s coverage of the Global Disinformation Index have revealed an expansive Censorship Complex that seeks to silence Americans for money, politics, ideology, and power, much still needs to be unraveled.

A search of government contracts and grants for the eight fiscal years from 2016 through today for the keywords “misinformation” or “disinformation” reveals 538 federal government grants and 36 contracts were awarded to a wide range of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations.

Mapping out the connections among the various award recipients, the government, and the pro-censorship left will require more work. But this simple snapshot confirms taxpayers’ money is funding the expansion of the Censorship Complex, as the prior eight fiscal years, from 2008 to 2015, reveal the federal government awarded only two federal contracts and seven federal grants for “disinformation” or “misinformation” research.

Likewise, an initial investigation into the nonprofits and academic institutions mentioned in the “Twitter Files” reveals government grants, donations from other liberal nonprofits, and money from leftist billionaires funded the expansion of the Censorship Complex. Research also shows the non-governmental organizations pushing the disinformation narrative are uniformly directed and run by former government employees, left-wing media types, and left-leaning or anti-Trump individuals.

Alliance Securing Democracy

Of the think tanks identified in Twitter communications, Alliance Securing Democracy (ASD) might be the most notorious thanks to Matt Taibbi’s exposé on ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard.

Devised by former FBI agent Clint Watts and launched in August of 2017, Hamilton 68 proclaimed its digital dashboard an aid to “help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin.” Based on some 644 accounts that Hamilton 68 claimed it had “selected for their relationship to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns,” ASD maintained its dashboard allowed users to track online Russian influence.

The problem is, as Taibbi wrote: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”

Apparently unbeknownst to ASD, Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and found “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” The entire methodology was flawed.

Yet ASD played a key role in the push to censor speech as supposed “disinformation,” with the dashboard serving as “the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years” by “virtually every major news organization.” In addition to the media spreading disinformation about disinformation, Watts testified before Congress, telling senators that the Hamilton 68 dashboard provided the means for the U.S. government “to have an understanding of what Russia is doing in social media.”

Watts further revealed in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, that he “tried to provide to the U.S. government directly through multiple agencies” the Hamilton 68 information, telling the lawmakers they should “want to equip our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Defense with just an understanding … of what Russian active measures are doing around the world.”

Whether any of those “multiple agencies” relied on the inaccurate information included on the Hamilton 68 dashboard is unclear.

Members of the House and Senate did rely on Hamilton 68, however. As I reported earlier this month: “Rep. Adam Schiff and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse, among others, not only pushed the unfounded claims that Russian bots were behind the trending hashtags, but they also demanded that Twitter and other tech companies investigate and stop such supposed interference.” Democrats pushed this false narrative even when Twitter executives warned staffers that the Russian-interference story didn’t stand.

In addition to Watts, the ASD advisory council includes a cornucopia of former government bigwigs from Democrat administrations: Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration; Michael Morell, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama; John Podesta, former chair of Hillary for America and an official in the Clinton and Obama White Houses; and Jake Sullivan, former deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key adviser for both Clinton and Obama during their general elections.

Laura Thornton, who previously worked at the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit loosely affiliated with the Democrat Party, currently oversees ASD. And Rachael Dean Wilson serves as the managing director for ASD. Wilson previously worked for the late Sen. John McCain for six years, serving as his communications director and adviser to his 2016 re-election campaign.

German Marshall Fund

According to its website, ASD is a project of the German Marshall Fund, which “is heavily funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.” The fund has also received grants from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The ASD likewise receives financing from left-leaning foundations, such as the Craigslist founder’s Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

The Election Integrity Partnership

Another prominent organization the “Twitter Files” revealed as pushing for censorship — including multiple censorship requests flowing through that group to the tech giant — is the Election Integrity Partnership, which is run out of Stanford’s Internet Observatory.

Stanford’s Internet Observatory launched on June 6, 2019, to “focus on the misuse of social media,” and within two years, the project grew from an initial team of three to a full-time team of 10 assisted by some 76 student research assistants. In 2020, Stanford announced the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership, which “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

As a private institution, Stanford University is not funded directly with tax dollars, but it receives millions in government grants. Private grants also flow into the California university and directly fund the Election Integrity Partnership, including money from the same foundations that funded the nonprofit behind Hamilton 68, such as money from the Craigslist and eBay founders.

Atlantic Council Project

Further research on the other members of the Election Integrity Partnership reveals the Atlantic Council receives donations and federal grants, including from Facebook, Google, and the U.S. Department of State. And as will be shown shortly, the Atlantic Council is also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.

Graphika

Another member of the Election Integrity Partnership, Graphika, describes itself as a “network analysis company that examines how ideas and influence spread online.” Graphika’s chief innovation officer, Camille Francois “leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment.” Francois was previously the principal researcher at Google’s Jigsaw unit.

According to CNBC, one of Francois’ first projects at Graphika was a “secretive” assignment for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Working with a team of researchers from Oxford University, Graphika analyzed data provided by social media firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess Russia’s exploitation of “the tools and platform of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to impact U.S. users” and influence elections.

As a private organization, Graphika’s funding details remain obscure, but in congressional testimony, Dr. Vlad Barash he “oversee[s] our work with DARPA and with our colleagues from leading academic institutions on developing and applying cutting edge methods and algorithms for detecting the manipulation of 21st Century networked communications.”

According to government data, Graphika — also known as Octant Data, LLC and Morningside Analytics — received numerous Department of Defense contracts. Additionally, Graphika received a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.”

Graphika received a second nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping.” The organization had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.

The Center for Internet Security

The “Twitter Files” also made mention of the Center for Internet Security. In 2018, that nonprofit launched the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which “it claims supports the cybersecurity needs of election offices.” As part of those efforts, the Center for Internet Security crafted a one-page document for election officials, with directions for reporting misinformation or disinformation to the EI-ISAC. The federal U.S. Elections Commission would link to the CIS flyer on its government webpage.

The CIS flyer directed election workers to submit supposed “misinformation or disinformation” to the EI-ISAC, stating it would then “forward it to our partners at The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).” CISA would then “submit it to the relevant social media platform(s) for review,” including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Nextdoor, and Snapchat.

CIS further said it would share reports of misinformation or disinformation with the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University. And from the “Twitter Files,” we see examples of the Election Integrity Partnership providing the Twitter team CIS’s reports of misinformation or disinformation, prompting the censorship of speech.

The Center for Internet Security is heavily funded by government grants. According to Influence Watch, the nonprofit “provides cyber-security consulting services to local, state, and federal governments,” and has been awarded $115 million in federal grants by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense since 2010. It has received $3.6 million in cybersecurity contracts from numerous federal agencies, according to its webpage, and a $290,000 grant from the eBay founder’s left-leaning Democracy Fund.

The president and CEO of the Center for Internet Security is another former high-level government adviser, John Gilligan. Gilligan “previously served in senior advisory positions in intelligence and security for the United States Airforce, Department of Energy, and White House Cyber Security Commission under the Obama administration.”

Clemson University

Other emails released as part of the “Twitter Files” reveal Clemson University’s role in the push for censorship at Twitter. And as was the case with Hamilton 68’s dashboard, Twitter’s team had concerns about Clemson’s disinformation research.

In one email, Twitter noted that Clemson’s center had asked the tech company to review its “findings regarding the latest list of accounts.” Internal communications show the Twitter team noting that while they saw “some inauthentic behaviors,” they “were unable to attribute the accounts to the IRA,” the Russian “troll” farm.

After noting that Twitter had already shared information with Clemson researchers, the tech giant’s head of safety, Yoel Roth, sent another email. “There is nothing new we’ll learn here, analytically,” Roth said. “We’re not going to attribute these accounts to Russia … absent some solid technical intel (which Clemson have not ever been able to provide).”

Defending Democracy Together

Clemson’s research was used by another group joining the “disinformation” trend, Defending Democracy Together (DDT). In 2018, DDT launched the RussiaTweets.com project to supposedly provide “the evidence of Russian interference in American politics.”

This evidence, according to DDT, came from a list of tweets “compiled and published by Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren,” which purportedly all came from the Russian troll factory, Internet Research Agency (IRA). Both Linvill and Warren hail from Clemson University, raising the question of whether it was the list they provided to Defending Democracy Together that Twitter executives “were unable to attribute” to the IRA.

Defending Democracy Together was founded in 2018, and its leadership consists of Never Trumpers, William “Bill” Kristol, Mona Charen, and Charlie Sykes, as well as DDT’s co-founder and director Sarah Longwell, who has promoted advertisements “to advocate against the policies of the Trump administration and to weaken public support for the Trump presidency.”

Funding for DDT, according to Influence Watch, includes money from left-wing mega-donor and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar through Democracy Fund Voice and from the Hopewell Fund, which is “part of a $600 million network of left-wing funding nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C.” Additionally, OpenSecrets reported that DDT was “the biggest ‘dark money’ spender of 2020,” with DDT spending “$15.4 million in ‘dark money’ during the 2020 election cycle on supporting presidential candidate Joe Biden and opposing former President Donald Trump for reelection.”

Other Academic Institutes

While Stanford and Clemson were the two main universities identified in the “Twitter Files,” Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub webpage identifies members of its “Disinformation Working Group,” revealing academia’s involvement in the Censorship Complex spans much further. It includes: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Lab, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Duke University, Bowdoin College, the University of South Carolina, Vanderbilt University, Georgetown University, and Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian University supported by a Facebook grant.

The University of Buffalo, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University are likewise involved in the disinformation project, with a Clemson News release revealing that faculty at those universities, along with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, launched a project titled “Disinformation Range to Improve User Awareness and Resilience to Online Disinformation.” The government, through a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is supporting those efforts.

The Aspen Institute

The Aspen Institute is also entwined in the Censorship Complex, having hosted in the fall of 2020 “a series of off-the-record briefings to help prepare every major US newsroom and tech platform for potential hack-and-leak operations and a contested post-election environment.” One of the briefings involved a tabletop exercise facilitated by Aspen’s Garrett Graff that posed a hack-and-leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden.

Twitter’s Yoel Roth attended that event just two weeks before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And soon after that story broke, Graff and his Aspen Institute colleague Vivian Schiller took to Twitter to frame the story as “crap” and “nonsense.” Schiller’s former jobs include CEO at NPR, head of news at Twitter, general manager at The New York Times, and chief digital officer at NBC News.

Soon after Graff and Schiller pushed the Hunter Biden story as misinformation, Twitter blocked the Post’s story and froze the conservative outlet’s account, even though internal communications revealed the Post had not violated Twitter’s terms of service. Despite its extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference, Twitter didn’t ask the bureau if the scandal was Russian disinformation. Instead, Twitter representatives testified to Congress that the company “relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.”

After the Post broke the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, several left-leaning “journalists” spent the day speaking of “misinformation,” while uniformly ignoring the substance of the story. One must wonder how many of those so-called journalists had attended Aspen’s training session.

Since then, Aspen has expanded its focus on disinformation and misinformation, launching a “Commission on Information Disorder” to develop what the institute calls “actionable public-private responses to the disinformation crisis.”

The Global Disinformation Index

Another nonprofit, the Global Disinformation Index, has already begun pushing an “actionable response to the disinformation crisis,” by pressuring advertisers to dump news outlets based on GDI’s view of their “disinformation risk.” However, as the Washington Examiner revealed in Gabe Kaminsky’s investigative series, the GDI’s December 2022 report, prepared in partnership with the University of Texas-Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab, brands only conservative outlets as the top “riskiest.” Conversely, the “least risky” outlets all lean left, other than The Wall Street Journal, and are also the same outlets that got the most significant news stories of the last decade wrong.

Like the “disinformation” nonprofits named in the “Twitter Files,” GDI has received federal grants and is connected to other left-leaning nonprofits and individuals seeking to censor speech. Its advisers likewise hew left, such as “journalist” Anne Applebaum, who said Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings were not interesting, and Finn Heinrich of the leftist George Soros’ Open Society group.

The composition of GDI’s “advisory panel” is also noteworthy because the same individuals guiding GDI’s mission to starve conservative sites of advertising dollars are connected to three of the organizations behind the Election Integrity Partnership’s push for censorship at Twitter. That fact would be difficult to discover today, though, as GDI scrubbed its “advisory panel” section of its homepage after the blacklist scandal broke.

According to the archived GDI homepage, advisory panel members include Ben Nimmo, the global lead at Meta; Franziska Roesner, a University of Washington professor; and Camille Francois of Niantic. Nimmo was a founding member of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and a senior fellow for that lab. He was also “the first director of investigations at Graphika.” Francois also serves as the chair of Graphika’s advisory board and is identified on Graphika’s webpage as its chief innovation officer. Roesner is a faculty member at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

Together then, three of the four organizations that partnered with Stanford to run the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed Twitter to censor speech in advance of the 2020 election, were also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.

Global Engagement Center

A strong connection also exists between GDI and the U.S. government through an arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, which has also made several appearances in the “Twitter Files.”

The Global Engagement Center, which proclaims itself “a data-driven body leading U.S. interagency efforts in proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda,” awarded the Global Disinformation Index a $100,000 grant as part of the U.S-Paris Tech Challenge. The State Department sponsored that “Tech Challenge” in “collaboration” with, among others, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Park Advisors, and Disinfo Cloud. According to a State Department spokesman, the Global Engagement Center began funding Disinfo Cloud in 2018 and also awarded approximately $300,000 to Park Advisors to manage Disinfo Coud to fight “disinformation, terrorism, violent extremism, hate speech.”

The “Twitter Files” revealed that, in addition to funding private organizations pushing for censorship, the State Department’s Global Disinformation Center attempted to insert itself into Twitter’s review and censorship process. When those efforts failed, the Global Disinformation Center pressed its unsupported claims of disinformation to the media.

Additional research is needed to understand the full scope of the Global Engagement Center’s role in the Censorship Complex, but what little is known now suggests the State Department provides load-bearing support for the project. A recent report from the Foundation for Freedom Online also exposes the National Science Foundation as a key funder in “the science of censorship.”

While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Biden Admin Pushes Transgender Medical ‘Care’ While Quietly Bankrolling Research Showing Its Risks

BY: ANONYMOUS | FEBRUARY 28, 2023

hormone blockers — NIH is funding many studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones. Yet HHS is pushing for more transgender ‘care.’

ANONYMOUS

As the Biden administration pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to make “gender-affirming health care” more widely available, HHS’s own National Institutes of Health is funding multiple studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term risks of taking cross-sex hormones and whether they improve mental health. The NIH research on transgender issues also emphasizes intersectionality and about half has been on HIV prevention.

The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 74 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually. Several NIH-funded studies examine specific health risks of cross-sex hormone treatment — such as associated bone loss and possible increased risk of thrombosis, drug overdose, heart attack, and stroke.

Only a few studies evaluate the risk of infertility, even though “the impact of long-term cross-sex hormone therapy on reproductive health is largely unknown,” as one such project states and experts have warned. In contrast, seven studies examine stigma and disparities in health care for transgender people, in response to NIH’s Notice of Special Interest in understanding the role of alleged intersectional stigmas and how they harm health.

Many studies address higher incidence of sexually transmitted infections in transgender people, and whether hormone therapy might increase that risk. About half of all NIH-funded research on transgender health, including that which has been completed, relates to HIV prevention among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.

Transgender males “have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults,” according to one project summary. Behavioral factors contribute, another project says, but the role of sex hormones needs further study, since they “are known to modulate the immune response, resulting in changes in host susceptibility to pathogens, vaccine efficacy and drug metabolism.”

Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research

While suicide prevention is often cited as a major reason to give dysphoric children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, only one of the current studies is focused specifically on suicide risk, although several emphasize the lack of long-term studies of cross-sex hormones administered to children and their relation to mental health.

Medical professionals “say more specific research is needed to determine whether medically transitioning as a minor reduces suicidal thoughts and suicides compared with those who socially transition or wait before starting treatment,” according to Reuters.

One NIH-funded project summary acknowledges that the long-term effect of puberty suppression on mental health needs further study and will evaluate children already taking puberty blockers.

During puberty, hormones change the structure and organization of the brain. Puberty blockers “may also disrupt puberty-signaled neural maturation in ways that can undermine mental health gains over time and impact quality of life in other ways,” the Nationwide Children’s Hospital project summary says. “The overall impacts” of puberty blockers “have not been systematically studied,” the summary says.

One of the larger NIH-funded transgender studies, funded at $743,000 annually, is at Boston Children’s Hospital. It notes, “Little is known [emphasis added] about how pubertal blockade, the first step in the medical management of a young transgender adolescent, affects bone health and psychological well-being. … In an exploratory aim, we will also consider the effect of pubertal blockade on anxiety, depression, and health-related quality of life.”

Another research project, “Psychological consequences of medical transition in transgender youth,” begun last year at Princeton University and anticipated to end in 2025, notes the lack of quality research in this area:

Five studies to date have longitudinally examined the relationship between one or both of these interventions [puberty suppression and hormone therapy] and mental health in transgender youth. However, these studies have had relatively small samples, none have been able to isolate the effects of endocrine interventions, none have included a cisgender [non-transgender] comparison group, and none have examined the mechanisms by which endocrine interventions might improve mental health.

A longitudinal study that began in 2015 and will run through at least 2026 acknowledges, “Transgender children and adolescents are a poorly understood and a distinctly understudied population in the United States. … Continuing our current research is imperative to expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth and thus, is of considerable public health significance.”

As the summary of one ongoing NIH-funded research project on sex hormones’ effects on the developing brain says, “There is little to no empirical data guiding clinical practices” of cross-sex hormone therapy in early pubertal adolescents, “highlighting the need for further research to address the critical knowledge gap.” The research, funded at $3 million so far to Stanford University, “will provide a much-needed foundation for understanding the longitudinal impact of treatments that are already being used [emphasis added] in clinical settings.”

The project will elucidate “how sex hormone therapy alters sex-specific risk for disease … and [its] impact on neural networks implicated in psychiatric disorders.” The research proposed “has never been conducted in early pubertal adolescents,” the summary reads.

NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved

The NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, told Reuters that “the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.” Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved puberty blockers and sex hormones for children’s transgender medical interventions. As Reuters reported:

No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them. More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning.

Countries such as Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have begun to limit children’s access to transgender health interventions. Early, foundational research from 2011 on transgender medical interventions has been criticized as failing to meet basic research standards.

Before 2012, “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” according to Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” Studies show most children grow out of gender dysphoria, Shrier says.“There are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition,” according to Shrier.

Yet Biden Administration Pushes Transgender ‘Care’

Meanwhile, despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executive orders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.” The administration also opposes “conversion therapy — efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.

I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?

HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which is overseen by transgender Dr. Rachel Levine, states there’s no debate: “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Other proponents acknowledge a lack of research on these hormones’ effect on brain development, but say the pros outweigh the cons.

Growing Transgender Identification

The number of transgender adults in the U.S. is estimated at 1.4 million to 2 million, with an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 transgender children. The number of American children who started on puberty blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 from 2017 to 2021 and has been increasing, according to Reuters.

From 2019 to 2021, at least 56 patients ages 13 to 17 had genital surgeries, and from 2019 to 2021, at least 776 children that age had mastectomies, not including procedures that weren’t covered by insurance, according to Reuters.

The transgender surgery industry grosses more than $2 billion annually and expects to double that by 2030.

Debate Among Medication Providers

“Puberty delay medications are safe and effective,” according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a pro-transgender organization that sets standards for trans medical interventions. “Every person, including every TGD person, deserves an opportunity to be their true selves and has the right to access medically-necessary affirming care to enable this opportunity,” WPATH says.

When WPATH recently updated its guidance, authors “were acutely aware that any unknowns that the working group acknowledged — any uncertainties in the research — could be read as undermining the field’s credibility and feed the right-wing effort to outlaw gender-related care,” The New York Times reported. The newspaper is in the midst of an internal fight about its coverage of transgender issues, with some saying it has been too critical of transgender medical interventions.

A draft of the WPATH chapter for adolescents included minimum recommended ages for hormone treatments and breast removal or augmentation, but after criticism from providers and transgender activists, “it was determined that the specific ages would be removed to ensure greater access to care for more people,” WPATH said.

The final guidelines also walked back a recommendation that preteens and teenagers should provide evidence of several years of persistently identifying as transgender, to differentiate from kids whose change in identification is recent, and changed it to a vaguer “sustained” gender incongruence. “In the end, the chapter sided with the trans advocates who didn’t want kids to have to wait through potentially painful years of physical development,” according to the Times.

The final guidelines acknowledged that because of the limited long-term research, treatment without a comprehensive diagnostic assessment “has no empirical support and therefore carries the risk that the decision to start gender-affirming medical interventions may not be in the long-term best interest of the young person at that time.”

Reuters found that gender facilities across the country are not conducting recommended months-long assessments before administering hormones to children. Parents of 28 of 39 minors who had sought transgender interventions told Reuters they “felt pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” Gender-care professionals also said some of their peers are “pushing too many families to pursue treatment for their children before they undergo the comprehensive assessments recommended in professional guidelines.”

Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria

Some of the taxpayer-funded studies may bring clarity to the issue of gender dysphoria by examining its causes. One study will examine social media’s influence on children becoming transgender. A second will study “the life history calendar to examine young transgender women’s trajectories of violence, mental health, and protective processes.”

Another government-funded study will help determine how chromosomes, sexual organs, and hormones combine to create sex differences. Another will “uncover genetic underpinnings of female sexual orientation.”

This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.

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House GOP opens probe into Maryland woman’s rape, murder by alleged MS-13 member who crossed border as minor

By Danielle Wallace | Fox News | February 28, 2023

The House Judiciary GOP launched an investigation into the gruesome rape and murder of a 20-year-old Maryland woman by an alleged MS-13 gang member who crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor.

In a letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra Tuesday, Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Tom McClintock, R-Calif., noted how the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is charged with the care and placement of unaccompanied children referred by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

On Jan. 15, as the letter notes, Aberdeen, Maryland, police arrested a 17-year-old “illegal alien” and known MS-13 gang member from El Salvador for the violent assault and murder of 20-year-old Maryland resident Kayla Hamilton. Press reports say the suspect entered the U.S. in Rio Grande City, Texas, as an unaccompanied alien child and identified a woman living in Frederick, Maryland, as his aunt.

“The Biden administration’s open border policies have created vulnerabilities that criminal aliens and gang members exploit to the detriment of American citizens,” Jordan and McClintock said.

Kayla Hamilton was found raped and strangled to death in a mobile home. (Aberdeen Police Dept. )

Hamilton was found raped and strangled to death in a mobile home she recently moved to with her boyfriend, according to local news reports. Her mother, Tammy Nobles, told FOX 45 Baltimore that her daughter has autism but was “working really hard on being independent.”

“He was arrested at the border. They let his aunt come and pick him up and take him back to Fredericksburg Maryland. He shouldn’t be here,” Nobles reportedly said last month.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan launched a probe into the murder of 20-year-old Maryland woman Kayla Hamilton, allegedly by an MS-13 gang member. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“Pursuant to the Rules of the House Representatives, the Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to conduct oversight of the Biden Administration’s enforcement of federal immigration laws,” Jordan and McClintock wrote. They requested that Becerra provide all case information, including but not limited to the teen’s case file, family reunification packet, as well as any materials provided to HHS ORR by federal agencies such as Customs and Border Patrol upon the 17-year-old’s referral and any information provided to HHS ORR “pursuant to its request for information from the referring agency.”

They also requested “a detailed description of, and related documents regarding, what steps HHS took to establish and verify” the suspect’s age. They want Becerra to explain how HHS officials learned of, or were notified of, the suspect’s status as a known MS-13 gang member, what the source of that information was and when HHS first learned of that information.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, center, leads the agency charged with the care and placement of unaccompanied children referred by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and McClintock, chairman of the subcommittee on Immigration, Integrity, Security and Enforcement, also seek how HHS established and verified, if at all, the familial relationship between the now murder suspect and the woman he identified as his aunt. They want Becerra to provide all case materials referring or relating to the vetting of the teen’s sponsor – the woman identified as his aunt. The letter lists the deadline for the materials as March 13 by 5 p.m.

Fox News Digital reached out to HHS for comment on Tuesday.

Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on Twitter: @danimwallace.

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Woman behind Libs of TikTok writes children’s book that ‘will give parents and children a tool they can use to spot predatory behavior’

By: ALEX NITZBERG | February 27, 2023

Screenshot taken from video posted on the Libs of TikTok Twitter account

Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, has authored a children’s book meant to help teach kids to trust their parents and not keep secrets from them.

“If an adult tells a child to keep a secret from their parents, that’s a huge red flag. I wrote a kid’s book which will give parents and children a tool they can use to spot predatory behavior. My goal is to get this book into as many homes, schools, and libraries in this country as possible!” she tweeted on the Libs of TikTok Twitter account.

If an adult tells a child to keep a secret from their parents, that’s a huge red flag. I wrote a kid’s book which will give parents and children a tool they can use to spot predatory behavior.

My goal is to get this book into as many homes, schools, and https://t.co/qkD4dAW3O4… https://t.co/B1BTHSfY69 pic.twitter.com/aVMILL2ivJ
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 26, 2023

The forthcoming book, titled “No More Secrets: The Candy Cavern,” targets 4- to 8-year-old kids.

“My book is a colorful, modern-day take on the classic, Little Red Riding Hood,” Raichik wrote. “It is a fun, beautifully illustrated and age-appropriate story about a sheep named Rose who starts second grade with a new teacher, Mr. Wooly. He suspiciously convinces his students to eat candy and treats everyday at school while telling them to keep it a secret from their parents. Mr. Wooly uses phrases like, ‘don’t worry about what your parents said,’ ‘you can trust me,’ and ‘my class is a safe space.’ These are the very phrases that predators in authority positions use on children. Without a strong foundation of trust in her family, Rose may not have felt that twinge of uncertainty alarming her that something was off.”

Raichik uses the Libs of TikTok Twitter account to expose the activity and musings of radical leftists, often by reposting the videos that leftists themselves have shared online.

Seth Dillon, who is the CEO of the popular satire site the Babylon Bee, announced last year that he made a deal with Raichik that would “turn her heroic, high-risk work into a career” — he noted that he “personally” made the deal, and the Bee was not involved.

Dillon recently noted that Slack had permanently suspended service for Libs of TikTok: “If your business is defending kids, Slack doesn’t want your money,” he tweeted.

Raichik is scheduled to speak at the upcoming CPAC conference.

.@SlackHQ has permanently suspended @libsoftiktok. If your business is defending kids, Slack doesn’t want your money. pic.twitter.com/a0vWNF0ew0
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) February 25, 2023

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: Florida first lady wants to change our entire approach to cancer

Daniel Horowitz | February 27, 2023

The more money our government has pumped into cancer research, the more cancer has proliferated, culminating over the past year or so in an explosion of sudden cancers. We’ve spent $90 billion on cancer research just through the National Cancer Institute from 1971 until last decade. Yes, surgical techniques and early detection have gotten better in making certain cancers more survivable, but why have cancers exploded, and what about the progress and prudence of the standard oncological treatments? Are they really backed by data, science, and the good of the patient or by pharma greed and incentives created by government-funded monopolies, just as we saw with COVID?

This appears to be some of what is vexing the first lady of Florida in pursuit of her new approach to cancer funding, following her personal bout with breast cancer in 2021. “The Cancer Connect Collaborative will analyze and rethink the way Florida approaches cancer research, diagnosis, and treatments — through incentivizing proven and promising approaches to cancer care while reducing the role of bureaucratic red tape and special interests,” said Casey DeSantis during a public roundtable with Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo and other local doctors. “This collaborative will chart a course of action that will lead the nation and ultimately save lives.”

Typically, federal and state politicians outbid each other in funneling money toward cancer research and treatment that just perpetuates the same failed status quo and likely empowers the same monopoly stifling innovative thinking and approaches. After all, who will oppose a proposal for more cancer research? But this $170 million initiative called the Cancer Connect Collaborative, a large sum of money for a state government, seeks to break down barriers to introducing new ideas.

It all begins with honesty. “We know a lot about cancer – what causes it, and in many cases, what preventative steps can minimize the risk of a diagnosis,” reads the one-page printout from the Collaborative. “It’s time to open the tap on cancer information, and the Collaborative will be tasked with identifying the ways to ensure this is done.”

The Florida first lady passionately asserted, “It’s not good enough any more to hear ‘we don’t know what causes cancer.’ We do know a lot of what causes cancer. And frankly, I would like that information laid out in a straightforward manner free from tainted influences. I’d rather not rely on content and random articles brought to you by special interests that may, unfortunately, be part of the problem.”

Many Americans have long surmised that Big Pharma has kept the “tap of information” on cancer closed to purposely perpetuate a model that maximizes revenue while achieving very uneven and questionable outcomes, often at the cost of the quality of life of the patient. It’s almost like the medical establishment is enjoying this too much. With cancers exploding across the country, we need state governments to start rethinking our approach to cancer and imposing more transparency and direction on the funding rather than a blank check. We must ask why cancers are exploding, what some of the potential causes are, and whether the current regimented way of treating it is really the best approach for humanity.

I’ve witnessed the difficulty and sorrow of many friends and family members going through various forms of cancer treatment in recent years. What is striking about this experience is that the oncologists almost appear to have a computer-based algorithm on how they treat patients. The cost-benefit analyses are already baked into predetermined formulas, and they don’t appear to update them with clear data and clinical outcomes or changing facts on the ground. They are obdurately conditioned to strict, robotic protocols.

What many of us have learned from COVID is that the government-pharma complex is willing to push dangerous and ineffective treatments on patients while actively stifling much safer and more promising alternatives. As such, does anyone really think there is no better approach to cancer than the current circulation of endless forms of chemo that are fueled by the data provided by the manufacturers themselves, not necessarily real-life outcomes? Remember the 95% efficacy of Pfizer’s shot? Do you really think that was the company’s first rodeo manipulating its trial data? At some point, outcomes need to matter.

To that end, DeSantis and Ladapo are promising to gather state data about the proliferation and treatment of cancer to make it “both timely available and easily accessible.” The key is to actually have trustworthy and timely data on the cancer rates and reoccurrence rates. Without that we cannot assess the efficacy of this pharma empire, which often accounts for the bulk of revenue for some companies and many medical specialties.

“Currently, there is about a two-year lag between the time the data is collected, submitted, and analyzed. We need real-time data to asses current trends … for example, why are so many types of cancer skewing younger and becoming more prevalent? Case in point [referring to her own experience]. Why are there increasing concerns recently from some physicians about higher rates of reoccurrence?” said Casey DeSantis.

Indeed, one of the lessons we should learn from the broken health care system in the wake of COVID is that you can’t properly treat something you fail to diagnose and asses in terms of its cause.

This was the problem from day one with COVID. At least 95% of doctors were flummoxed by COVID, but there were certain doctors, such as Drs. Brian Tyson and George Fareed in El Centro, California, who were clearly treating thousands of people in their urgent care with success. Why didn’t the medical establishment observe what they did and break the barriers for their successes to become a part of the standard of care elsewhere? We now know why this was the case with COVID, but who’s to say this isn’t happening to some degree with cancer treatment too?

Funding for cancer is always a double-edged sword. As we saw with COVID, the funding for treatment fueled terrible products and was used to actively ensure that no effective product would ever emerge or be promoted. Despite our medical system spending $600 billion a year on cancer treatment, double the per-person rate of the average of other wealthy countries, there is no evidence of meaningfully better outcomes, according to a recent study published in JAMA.

The fact that this cancer funding is being inaugurated under the watch of Dr. Ladapo, a man who recognizes the lessons of the COVID disaster, should give us more confidence that he will take the approach to cancer in a different direction, just as he stands alone on the COVID shots.

Ladapo, during his remarks, spoke about the need to “step out” of the typical threshold standards of the NIH for preliminary research needed to fund a clinical trial. As we’ve all witnessed, that standard is often used as a gatekeeper to keep out promising treatments while green-lighting problematic ones. Ladapo spoke of his own experience as a researcher in how he plans to use some of this funding to offer entrepreneur scientists who might not be connected wit the heavy-hitter pharma companies to prove the promise of their innovative research and ideas.

Also, in what sounded like a clear understanding of the lessons of COVID, Casey DeSantis called for the group to study all the “best practices” across the nation and state to see what works and why it’s not being done everywhere. “Why, if a physician has been utilizing a proven technique within their hospital system for years, and that successful procedure is not available to other patients across the state – if not, why not? What reasons or barriers to entry are prohibiting successful practices from being made available to Floridians? Is it bureaucracy? Is it the lack of a billing code that allows for reimbursement? …How does one treatment get the reimbursement green light, while others may not?”

Put another way, is the remdesivir vs. ivermectin dynamic also playing out in cancer research and protocols? Overall, DeSantis was motivated by her personal experience to ensure that others have clarity and the best options headed forward. “I have to admit this is not a subject that is very easy, as you can imagine, for me to talk about. But I’m of the mind [that] when much is given, much is expected. And if I have the opportunity … to put a lot of really smart people into a room to rethink the way we approach cancer care, I’m going to do it, even if I have to use the C-word now and again.”

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Biden raises eyebrows with racial comment at Black History Month event: ‘But I’m not stupid’

By: CHRIS ENLOE | February 28, 2023

President Joe Biden made a bizarre race-related comment on Monday at a Black History Month event hosted at the White House. Speaking about the “Divine Nine” — the nine black Greek fraternities and sororities — Biden told the crowd that he is “not stupid,” despite being white, because he knows where the “power is.”

“I know real power when I see it: the Divine Nine,” he said, thanking the presidents of the Greek letter organizations for their attendance.

“And, by the way, you know I’m not — I may be a white boy, but I’m not stupid,” he added, drawing laughter from the crowd. “I know where the power is.”

“You think I’m joking,” he continued. “I learned a long time ago about the Divine Nine. And that’s why I spent so much time at Delaware State, campaigning and organizing my campaign in Delaware.”

Joe Biden:

"I may be a white boy, but I'm not stupid." pic.twitter.com/if1gEzblyc
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 27, 2023

It’s not immediately clear what Biden was trying to say. He was accused of suggesting that all white people are stupid and promoting self-hatred for white people.

The full context, however, suggests that Biden admitted to spending “so much time” campaigning at Delaware State University — a historically black college — because he believed that currying favor with black voters would help him win elections.

For decades, Democrats have been accused of assuming that certain demographics of voters — black, Hispanic, women, etc. — are guaranteed to vote for them. Biden infamously embodied that twisted idea when, while campaigning for president in 2020, he said that black voters aren’t really black if they vote for Donald Trump.

“I’ll tell you what: If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” Biden said.

That level of entitlement is behind Democrats’ slipping control on black voters, as demonstrated by 2020 exit polls showing that, for example, just 79% of black men voted for Biden, a percentage that has been dropping since 2012. The reality has become a five-alarm fire for Democrats, which is not surprising, according to Delano Squires.

“When a party assumes it is entitled to every vote within a certain demographic, it will treat even the slightest sign of defection as an emergency, and that’s what you’re seeing in Democratic circles when it comes to black men defecting to the right,” Squires wrote last fall.

President Biden and Vice President Harris Deliver Remarks at a Black History Month Reception

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Not A Joke

A.F. BRANCO | on February 28, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-not-a-joke/

Biden’s WHO draft ‘treaty’ makes ‘sovereign right’ to manage public health and pandemics ‘provisional’.

Biden WHO Treaty — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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COVID-19 pandemic likely came from Chinese lab leak, US department now says in classified documents

By: PAUL SACCA | February 26, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a Chinese lab leak, the U.S. Department of Energy has reportedly concluded. According to a classified intelligence report recently supplied to the White House and key members of Congress, a leak from a Chinese laboratory is the likely origin of the COVID pandemic.

The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory.”

The WSJ stated, “The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.”

The report – which is reportedly less than five pages – noted that the Department of Energy made the determination with “low confidence.” In 2021, the FBI reportedly concluded that COVID escaped to the public through a lab leak. The FBI made its judgment with “moderate confidence.” The U.S. agencies allegedly clarified that COVID-19 escaped from a lab, and was not part of a Chinese biological weapons program.

Meanwhile, four other U.S. government agencies suspect that the coronavirus pandemic was most likely the result of natural transmission. Two other agencies – including the CIA – have yet to establish where the deadly pandemic originated.

David Relman – a Stanford University microbiologist – told the WSJ, “Kudos to those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions and objectively re-examine what we know and don’t know about COVID origins. My plea is that we not accept an incomplete answer or give up because of political expediency.”

A spokesperson for the Energy Department spokesman did not confirm or deny the report, but said the agency “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

The initial explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic was that the virus originated from a wet market in Wuhan, China. Many believe that the virus mutated and was able to jump from animals to humans. However, the animal source was never actually identified. Since the pandemic began, there have been many who suspect that COVID-19 may have possibly escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China – a Chinese laboratory that studies coronaviruses and has the highest biosafety risk level.

The WSJ highlighted, “Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002. They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.”

The lab leak theory has been dismissed by top health officials, major media outlets, and influential politicians. The idea that COVID came from a lab has been disregarded as a conspiracy theory. Some even claimed that just proposing the lab leak theory is racist.

In January, a group of national security experts slammed the New York Times and other legacy media outlets for dismissing the lab leak theory. Big tech previously censored the lab leak theory, and punished and even banned social media users who questioned the origin of COVID.

In early 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci – the government’s top infectious diseases expert – along with other top health officials pushed messaging that a “laboratory-based scenario” is not plausible, and anyone suggesting otherwise is likely a conspiracy theorist.

Fauci told National Geographic in May 2020:

If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.

In May 2021, Fauci admitted that he wasn’t “convinced” that COVID was caused by natural transmission.

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Lawsuit Forces Los Angeles County To Remove 1.2 Million Ineligible Voters From Rolls

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Los Angeles County, California confirmed it had removed 1.2 million ineligible voters from its rolls thanks to a settlement with the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch, the group announced Friday. Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in 2017 on behalf of itself and four registered voters in Los Angeles County. Election Integrity Project California, Inc., another public interest group, was also a part of the lawsuit.

Under the agreement, Los Angeles had to send 1.6 million address confirmation notices to voters listed “inactive” on its voter rolls. According to the National Voter Registration Act — which requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls — states and counties must remove from their voting rolls voters who do not respond to such mailers and do not vote in the next two federal elections.

In its most recent progress report for complying with the settlement, Los Angeles told Judicial Watch it had removed a total of 1.2 million ineligible voters from its rolls. Last year, the county revealed that 634,000 of its inactive voters hadn’t voted in the past 10 years.

Back in 2017 when Judicial Watch first filed its lawsuit, it argued Los Angeles County had more registered voters than residents eligible to register and the “highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country.” According to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission at that time, voter registration for the county was 112 percent of its adult citizen population.

“This long overdue voter roll clean-up of 1.2 million registrations in Los Angeles County is a historic victory and means California elections are less at risk for fraud,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. “Building on this success, Judicial Watch will continue its lawsuits and activism to clean up voter rolls and to promote and protect cleaner elections.”

This isn’t the first lawsuit of its kind by Judicial Watch. New York City recently removed 441,083 ineligible voters from its voter rolls after reaching a settlement with the conservative advocacy group. North Carolina also removed more than 430,000 ineligible registrants from its rolls due to a similar lawsuit, and Kentucky agreed to do the same in response to a lawsuit.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation is another good government group that has filed lawsuits to compel states including Michigan and Pennsylvania to clean their voter rolls to guard against potential election fraud.

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

Author Victoria Marshall profile

VICTORIA MARSHALL

VISIT ON TWITTER@VEMRSHLL

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‘We Became a Hotel’: AZ Hospital Pushed to the Limit Because of Illegal Immigrants

By: Julio Rosas | February 27, 2023 3:00 PM

YUMA, Ariz. — GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee met with the leadership of the Yuma Regional Medical Center on Thursday to hear how medical services have been impacted over the significant influx of illegal immigrants into the region.

Dr. Robert Trenschel, president and CEO of the medical center, told the delegation that his hospital has around $26 million in unpaid bills for services rendered to illegal immigrants. Trenschel said the priority of who gets seen depends on how severe their illness or injuries are, no matter what their legal status is. This has caused medical services to be prioritized towards the illegal immigrants, as their illnesses and injuries are significant following their journey across the border.

Yuma’s population is just under 100,000, with several nearby towns adding roughly 38,000 people. The medical center was built up to accommodate that population size. Since the surge of illegal immigration that started in their area in December of 2021, over 300,000 people have illegally crossed into the region.

“We have to see them. Any one of those that needs a hospital visit and we’ve done that. We do it with pride…But what we need is a payer source for those individuals because we have nobody to bill. They have no resources and they’ve just continued to come in,” Trenschel explained.

“We’ve had people in our ICUs for over 60 days…They’ve needed dialysis, heart surgery, cardiac catheterization, I mean, they’re sick when they come over. Not all of them but many and some come in with minor bumps and bruises, things like that…and we have no payer source for that care and that’s our biggest issue. For a hospital like us, it prevents us from doing other things we normally do for our community,” he continued.

Though it is not on the brink of collapse, Trenschel said the hospital system losing out on $26 million in a such a short amount of time has made a severe impact on its operations.

“Really, the community is the one that suffers,” he added.

One of the biggest examples of their services being strained is the hospital’s maternity ward having to care for the mothers and newborn babies for much longer than U.S. citizens because the staff has to ensure they are healthy enough to be discharged since most of the time it was unknown when the next time they would see a doctor.

Trenschel said the hospital has had to postpone planned inductions for mothers who were U.S. citizens “and we had to say, ‘Sorry, we’re just full in our maternity unit.'”

Dorie Rush, the director of women and children services, told GOP lawmakers that the hospital staff has plenty of Spanish speakers. But, many of the illegal immigrants coming in for treatment do not speak Spanish, as they came from other countries, like Haiti. Due to this, the hospital system has purchased multiple translation tablets in order to communicate with the patients.

“We had our walls lined with Border Patrol and Customs agents because when they first were bringing the patients in, they would stay with the patients…There was one day when we had five agents from five different locations bring five different patients at the same time into our triage area, and it’s only seven beds,” Rush recalled.

“So as you can imagine, our general population of patients that were here sitting in the waiting room, lined up, backed up, not being able to get everybody, obviously at the same time, caused a lot of

frustration with our communities,” she added.

Rush said even after people were technically discharged, they still had to keep them there because the hospital is required to ensure they have access to follow up care, which many of the patients had no such guarantee, and to ensure they are able to get to their next location.

“We became a hotel. We did. Up on our pediatric unit, we have a set amount of rooms that we set aside for these patients when they are discharged so that we could keep them here until they could get to the appropriate location,” she said, noting staff still had to check up on the patients in the “hotel” since they were still in the hospital’s care. Rush also had to go out into town to buy every single carseat for babies in order to give to the migrant mothers once they were discharged since they are required by law to not allow babies to leave their care unless there is a carseat.

“Weird question, did they seem grateful? Did they seem overwhelmed from where the world they came from?” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) asked.

“I would say a lot of them were grateful. Some of them expected us, I had one tell me, ‘You will help me get to Florida. You will pay for this.’ I explained nicely that we will work with your family, but that will come from your family, not from us,” a hospital staff answered.

Rush revealed actual hotels in the area stopped accepting the illegal immigrants because of “issues” pertaining to their behavior while staying at their locations.

Google reviews left on Yuma Regional Medical Center’s page within the past few months frequently say the long wait times are a major factor for giving the low ratings.

None of the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee were in Yuma to take part of the tours or the hearing that later took place at city hall. Border Patrol agents in the Yuma Sector voiced their displeasure to Townhall over Democrats not bothering to show up to an official hearing.

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Erin Brockovich unloads on Biden admin’s ‘frustrating’ response to East Palestine disaster: ‘You’re not gonna gaslight me’

By: PAUL SACCA | February 26, 2023

Environmental activist Erin Brockovich torched the “frustrating” response by the Biden administration to the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Brockovich appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Friday, where she accused the government of hiding ominous details from the American people following the disastrous train derailment in East Palestine.

Tucker Carlson asked Brockovich if government officials are hiding information about the environmental impacts of the train derailment.

“Yeah, there is. And I mean, it’s like, Oh my gosh, come on,” Brockovich replied, according to Mediaite. “Oh, we’re out here. What, 44,000 fish are dead? We’ve seen them. We’ve seen them out here today aerating the creeks. They’re removing stuff. That, the wellheads are locked. What’s up?”

Brockovich compared dead animals in East Palestine to miners bringing canaries into coal mines to detect dangerous and toxic conditions.

“Look, you don’t have to go any further, in my opinion, than a hundred-year study that we all know the miners did for us,” she explained. “It’s called the canary in the mine shaft. Send the canary down there, it dies: Might not be good for humans.”

“You have dead fish: might not be good for humans. You have dead animals: might not be good for humans,” Brockovich continued. “You’ve sent a horrible mixed message to this community. Drink the water. Don’t drink the water. Safe. Not safe.”

Brockovich said the mixed messaging has been “horribly confusing and extremely frustrating” to the residents of East Palestine.

“And something actually has gone wrong here,” she added. “And there’s information that has yet to come forward, and the story will continue to unfold.”

Brockovich told Carlson that schools have shut off drinking fountains and some private wells have locks on them.

“So, in the schools, so the children can’t drink the fountains, and then on private wells around here, they’ve got locks on them,” Brockovich revealed. “So they obviously — aw, come on. Wha– if there’s no problem, you don’t need to lock up a drinking fountain. You don’t need to be aerating the system. And you can explain away all day long to me that nothing’s wrong. But I, I see what’s going on here.”

Brockovich declared, “You’re not gonna gaslight me.”

Erin Brockovich demands government officials stop ‘gaslighting’ East Palestine, Ohio

President Joe Biden has not visited East Palestine.

On Friday, Biden was asked by a reporter if he would visit East Palestine.

Biden replied, “This time, I’m not. I was — I did a whole video — I mean — you know, the — what the hell — on…”

A reporter chimed in and suggested the word Biden was looking for was “Zoom.”

Biden said, “Zoom! Zoom.”

Biden then went off on a tangent, “All I can hear every time I think of Zoom is that song of my generation, ‘Who’s Zoomin’ Who?'”

“The answer is that I — I had a long meeting with my team as to what they’re doing,” Biden said. “You know, we were there two hours after the train went down. Two hours. I’ve spoken with every single major figure in both the Uni- — in both Pennsylvania and in O- — and in Ohio.”

"Are you planning on traveling to East Palestine?"

BIDEN: "At this moment not. I was, I did a whole video, I mean, uh, you know, the uh, what the hell? On…"

"Zoom?"

BIDEN: "Zoom. All I can hear every time I think of Zoom is that song of my generation, 'Who's Zoomin' Who?'" pic.twitter.com/fBWAVar7Gm
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 24, 2023

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Woody Harrelson’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ COVID monologue riles elites; Musk calls it ‘based’

By: MICHELE BLOOD | February 26, 2023

**Photo by: Rosalind OConnor/NBC via Getty Images**

Woody Harrelson’s “Saturday Night Live” monologue garnered instant backlash and praise over commentary hinting at government’s collusion with media and the medical industry to require COVID vaccines.

“So, the movie goes like this,” 61-year-old Harrelson begins. “The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.”

Harrelson set up the bit by joking about a script he was reading in 2019 in Central Park while smoking marijuana. He concluded the joke with, “I threw the script away. I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea? Being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day.”

Twitter CEO Elon Musk was quick to add his thoughts as social media approached meltdown over Harrelson’s routine.

“So, based. Nice work @nbcsnl!” Musk tweeted.

So based. Nice work @nbcsnl!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 26, 2023

Musk used a bullseye target emoji to respond to a post by @KanekoaTheGreat. @KanekoaTheGreat had joked about media’s apparent hypocrisy in its own response to Harrelson’s joke.

🎯
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 26, 2023

Musk also responded to users @EndWokeness and @ImMeme0 who commented on the media’s instant, negative response to Harrelson suggesting media had colluded with government and the medical industry.

“Maybe they don’t realize that their propaganda is wrong?” Musk tweeted.

Maybe they don’t realize that their propaganda is wrong?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 26, 2023

Rolling Stone was out at 12:37 a.m. Sunday morning with a piece blasting Harrelson’s monologue as “bizarre.” In the piece, the author says Harrelson has a “history of strange anti-science remarks during the COVID pandemic.”

The outlet tweeted about Harrelson’s joke, saying it amounted to spreading “conspiracy theories.”

Woody Harrelson spreads Covid conspiracy theories during SNL monologue: "The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes…" https://t.co/QxCZSxLSvE
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) February 26, 2023

Rolling Stone was joined by multiple left-leaning outlets in panning Harrelson’s monologue. Others included Variety, the Daily Beast, and HuffPost. The tenor of the pieces was negative, and cast Harrelson’s jokes as “anti-vax.”

A native Texan and long time advocate of marijuana decriminalization, 61-year-old Harrelson was cast as character Woody on “Cheers” in 1982. He later starred in many hit films including “Doc Hollywood,” “White Men Can’t Jump,” “Indecent Proposal,” “No Country for Old Men,” and “The Hunger Games.”

Harrelson’s latest film, “Champions,” is coming to theaters on March 10, Movie Insider reports.

Watch Harrelson’s Saturday Night Live monologue below.

Woody Harrelson Monologue – SNL

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Teen sues hospitals, physicians over ‘coercing’ her into ‘medical mutilation’ via gender transitioning

By: MICHELE BLOOD | February 25, 2023

Chloe Cole, 18, is suing the hospitals and physicians who ‘coerced’ her to transition from a girl to a boy in the name of profit, Cole’s attorneys announced in a press release Thursday obtained by TheBlaze.

“I am going forward in taking legal action because every second that goes by, more blood is spilled by the same individuals and medical centers that destroyed my body and childhood,” Cole said in the statement.

“After we launched my lawsuit last year, there has been an explosion of both detransitioners and their lawsuits all over the country. Unfortunately, I am no longer alone in my pain and suffering,” Cole also said.

Detransitioners are people who underwent chemical and/or surgical transition from one gender to the other, later returning to embracing their original, biological gender. Cole is among them. Cole, a biological female suffering from gender dysphoria, underwent surgical and chemical gender transitioning procedures between the ages of 13-16.

Cole’s Center for American Liberty attorneys say doctors lied to Cole and her parents in a number of ways. Those lies included saying Cole’s gender dysphoria would never resolve itself and saying Cole was at high risk for suicide unless she was socially and medically transitioned.

Those lies amount to fraud, according to Cole’s attorneys. As a result, the young woman was subjected to a “lifetime of irreversible physical and psychological damage.”

Cole’s victimization and abuse by medical professionals was profit-driven, according to attorney Charles LiMandri. Their “fraudulent and coercive actions” resulted in “excruciating pain and suffering, permanent disfigurement, loss of enjoyment of life, and extreme emotional distress,” LiMandri also said.

In addition to puberty blockers and off-label cross-sex hormone “treatment,” Cole’s doctors removed her breasts, performing a radical, double mastectomy.

“Chloe’s family sought medical treatment for her at Kaiser. Her physicians and other medical professionals violated the first norm of the profession, the Hippocratic Oath, when, instead of caring for her and providing medically competent diagnoses and treatment, they permanently disfigured her for profit,” attorney Harmeet Dhillon said in the statement.

“What happened to Chloe at Kaiser should never happen to any child in America, and the Center for American Liberty is committed to protecting children like Chloe,” Dhillon added.

Dhillon Law Group and LiMandri & Jonna LLP, in conjunction with the Center for American Liberty have filed a lawsuit against the Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan & Kaiser Foundation Hospitals who performed, supervised, and/or advised transgender hormone therapy and surgical intervention for Cole, now 18, when Cole was a minor.

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Law, Political

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco cartoon – Classless

A.F. BRANCO | on February 26, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-classless/

Public school enrollment in Minnesota has declined for a third consecutive year, according to data released this week by the Department of Education.

Minnesota Public School Enrollment Decline — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Child’s Play

A.F. BRANCO| on February 27, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-childs-play/

Biden dealing with the Ukraine-Russian war is like a child playing with matches next to a gas can.

Biden and Ukraine — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

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Education, Political

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Massive student savagely knocks teacher unconscious, then stomps and punches her unresponsive body because she took away his Nintendo Switch, deputies say

By: JOSEPH MACKINNON | February 24, 2023

**Image source: YouTube video, WKMG-TV – Screenshot**

A massive student brutalized a teacher’s aide Tuesday in an unprovoked attack at Matanzas High School in Palm Coast, Florida, leaving the woman unconscious and severely injured. His apparent reason for jeopardizing the woman’s life: She had prevented him from playing video games in class.

According to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, FCSO School Resource Deputies at the school were alerted to the brutal assault on a paraprofessional by a 6’6″, 270-pound student.

The student told deputies that he was upset that the victim had taken his Nintendo Switch away from him during class. WTLV-TV reported that the student also told officials that he would “beat her up” any time she tried to take his game.

The paraprofessional’s attempt to spare the 17-year-old from the mindless distraction and to help facilitate his education evidently proved unbearable for the student, who can be seen in surveillance footage barreling toward the victim and knocking her from her feet.

Motionless and unconscious after the initial unprovoked attack, the defenseless victim can be seen in the video suffering stomps, kicks, and a flurry of punches to the back of her head from the heavyset suspect.

The 270-pound student can be seen straddling the victim during the attack, delivering blows to her sides and back before others finally intervened:

Video shows Flagler County school employee attacked by student over Nintendo Switchyoutu.be

The FCSO indicated that the victim, hit at least 15 times, was taken to AdventHealth Palm Coast for treatment of her wounds, but not before her aggressor reportedly managed to spit on her body and threaten to come back and kill her.

Restrained by multiple school staff members, the student was taken to the Sheriff Perry Hall Inmate Detention Facility. While deputies processed him after the grievous attack, the student reportedly kicked the deputy’s desk and computer. He was later handed off to the Department of Juvenile Justice.

He has been charged with felony aggravated battery with bodily harm.

“The actions of this student are absolutely horrendous and completely uncalled for,” Sheriff Rick Staly said in a statement. “We hope the victim will be able to recover, both mentally and physically, from this incident. Thankfully, students and staff members came to the victim’s aid before the SRDs could arrive. Our schools should be a safe place – for both employees and students.”

Flagler Schools Superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt said, “Creating a safe learning and working environment on our campuses is critical. Violence is never an appropriate reaction.”

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Crime, Education

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF FEBRUARY 24, 2023

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Political

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Biden Pentagon Orders Military Chaplains To Bless Putting Male Soldiers In Female Showers And Bedrooms

BY: ELAINE DONNELLY | FEBRUARY 24, 2023

women soldiers — **Why should a tank commander at Fort Hood have to deal with pronouns instead of training his troops to fight an enemy force?**

Author Elaine Donnelly profile

ELAINE DONNELLY

The nation is worried about serious national security threats, including Chinese spy aircraft, but the U.S. Department of Defense seems pre-occupied with misplaced priorities. “Woke” policies are taking leftist ideologies to extremes with enforced compliance, even if it hurts the institution.

Since January 2021, Defense Department officials have expanded woke transgender mandates in significant ways. A comprehensive policy analysis titled “Biden Pentagon Quietly Expands Woke Transgender Policies in the Military,” summarized here, compares Joe Biden and Lloyd Austin directives to the 2016 transgender policies of Barack Obama and Ashton Carter.

As in the Obama years, the Biden/Austin policy fully embraces the idea that individuals can change their “sex assigned at birth to a different gender role.” Department of Defense Instruction 1300.28, updated on Dec. 20, 2022, has changed the official vocabulary of this pseudo-science, using the phrase “self-identified gender” instead of “preferred gender” throughout.

WHY? Why is this SO important to the wacky Left? “Gender Dysphoria” is a condition of someone who is CONFUSED about their gender. Do we really need more CONFUSED people in our military? As a Vietnam Vet, I can testify that such people cannot be trusted in the trenches of war. Your confused about your gender? You have NO business in any aspect of military service.

The DOD Instruction stipulates that if a person “self-identifies” as a person of the opposite sex, and if the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) changes a person’s bureaucratic “gender marker,” a man claiming to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and vice versa.

Military commanders, doctors and nurses, chaplains, and military men and women at all levels must endorse and act on this ideological belief or suffer career penalties if they don’t. Alleged “biases against transgender individuals,” which are prohibited, could include anything from “misgendering” people with the wrong pronouns to expressions of concern about medically questionable hormone treatments or surgeries for adults or military-dependent children.

Individuals who are confused about gender identity deserve compassionate counseling, competent medical care, and complete information about the serious risks and irreversible consequences of “gender-affirming” treatments that do not change biological sex. Instead, a self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria permits only one course of treatment, pushing the service member toward life-changing, often-irreversible transgender “transition,” without an independent “second opinion.”

Commanders are directed to consult with designated “experts,” called Service Central Coordination Cells. The SCCCs have no responsibility for military operations or any obligation to put the needs of the patient first.

Biden’s regulations do not protect or even mention rights of religious liberty for chaplains and people of faith. Nor do they provide options for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who object to transgender ideology on moral or ethical grounds.

Once a military doctor approves, transgender transition can be deemed “complete” with or without surgical alteration of healthy body parts. At that point, as the DOD Instruction states several times: “[S]ervice members will use those berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities associated with their gender marker in DEERS.”

This policy denies human biological realities and violates minimal expectations of personal privacy and modesty between men and women. Human dilemmas are discussed in PowerPoint training slide “vignettes,” such as a “female to male” soldier announcing a pregnancy.

Vignette 8 portrays a soldier who transitioned from male to female, without “sex-reassignment surgery,” who wants to use female-designated showers. Another scenario describes a female soldier who is experiencing tension with a “transgender female” roommate.

This is a trick question, since both the discomforted female soldier and a commander who tries to find a solution likely would be accused of “biases against transgender individuals.” Why should a tank commander at Fort Hood have to deal with pronoun etiquette and sticky scenarios instead of training his troops to fight an enemy force?

The latest DOD Instruction admits that some service members who have “completed a gender transition” may not have “resolved the gender dysphoria.” Without any estimate of costs or consequences, additional medical procedures are authorized “If a return to their previous gender is medically required.”

Biden/Austin directives specifically involve the military service academies and Reserve Officer Training Corps (contract) programs, inviting controversies like those affecting civilian female athletes who have lost competitions against biological men.

Revised rules also permit cross-dressing and other “transitioning” behaviors while in “on-duty status.” Previously, time off for “real life experience” (RLE) living as a person of the opposite sex could only occur off-base and off-duty, often for weeks or months. Whether intended or not, the revised policy’s approval of on-base cross-dressing likely will increase “LGBT Pride” celebrations featuring drag queen performances and “family-friendly” story hours for children at military bases worldwide.

When problems ensue, how will we know? In 2018, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis testified that problems with transgender policies were not being reported up the chain of command because they were considered “personal and private.” Doubling down in December 2022, the DOD released a new instruction, DODI 6400.11, which restricts (without high-level permission) the release of information about “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “transgender-related information,” and “incidents of harmful behaviors.”

Every year, the Pentagon releases non-personal statistics on sexual assaults, in excruciating detail. Why are officials restricting access to data on “incidents of harmful behaviors” and “transgender-related information”? Congress needs to find out.

A recent independent, high-tech survey on the politicization of the military done by the Heritage Foundation found that among active-duty respondents, 80 percent said the “changing of policy to allow unrestricted service by transgender individuals” has decreased their trust in the military. Sixty-eight percent of active-duty responses reported seeing a “growing politicization,” which is affecting their decision to encourage their children to join the military.

In view of current recruiting problems, the 118th Congress should renew previous demands for information on woke policies. Congress also should consider mandating that all Defense Department agencies and educational institutions return to recognizing scientific realities of biological sex, not “self-identified gender.” That idea and more are incorporated in legislation just proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. James Banks, R-Ind., called the Ensuring Military Readiness Act of 2023.

Servicemen and women deserve reality-based health care programs, with protection for the rights of doctors and nurses whose medical ethics or religious convictions differ from transgender ideology. Women also deserve separate-sex athletic teams and reasonable privacy in female-only living facilities.

White House and Pentagon leaders who try to deny, dissemble, or withhold information on the existence or results of woke policies in the military are undermining their own credibility. Americans are awake and aware, and they will hold lawmakers accountable for woke-ism that weakens our military in an increasingly dangerous world.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense.

Elaine Donnelly is President of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that reports on and analyzes military and social issues.

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Military, Political

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How Trump Derangement Gave Birth To The Censorship-Industrial Complex

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 24, 2023

Trump Derangement fake news protest sign in a crowd of people — **Unlike the military-industrial complex, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you on every topic.**

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a “Disinformation Board,” but a more insidious “Censorship Complex” already exists and is growing at an alarming speed.

This Censorship Complex is bigger than banned Twitter accounts or Democrats’ propensity for groupthink. Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation — and thus the country and the world.

Americans grasped a thread of this reality with the release of the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s reporting on the Global Disinformation Index, which revealed the coordinated censorship of speech by government officials, nonprofits, and the media. Yet Americans have no idea of the breadth and depth of the “Censorship Complex” — and how much it threatens the fabric of this country.

In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” via the new sweeping military-industrial complex. Its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [was] felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” Replace “military-industrial” with “censorship,” and you arrive at the reality Americans face today.

Origins of the Censorship Complex

Even with the rise of independent news outlets, until about 2016 the left-leaning corporate media controlled the flow of information. Then Donald Trump entered the political arena and used social media to speak directly to Americans. Despite the Russia hoax and the media’s all-out assault, Trump won, proving the strategic use of social media could prevail against a unified corporate press. The left was terrified.

Of course, Democrats and the media couldn’t admit their previous control over information converted to electoral victories and that for their own self-preservation, they needed to suppress other voices. So instead, the left began pushing the narrative that “disinformation” — including Russian disinformation — from alternative news outlets and social media companies handed Trump the election.

The New York Times first pushed the “disinformation” narrative using the “fake news” moniker after the 2016 election. “The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national soul-searching, with liberals across the country asking how a nation of millions could be marching to such a suspect drumbeat. Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion,” the Times wrote, bemoaning the public’s reliance on Facebook.

“Narrowly defined, ‘fake news’ means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites,” the Times wrote, feigning objectivity. But its conclusion? “Fake and hyperpartisan news from the right has been more conspicuous than from the left.”

Two days later, Hillary Clinton repeated the narrative-building phrase, condemning what she called “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.” But then, as if to remind Democrats and the legacy press that he had wrestled control of the narrative from them, Trump branded left-wing outlets “fake news” — and just like that, the catchphrase belonged to him.

Disinformation Is Scarier if It’s Russian

That didn’t deter the left in its mission to destroy alternative channels of communication, however. The media abandoned its “fake news” framing for the “disinformation” buzzword. “Misinformation” and “mal-information” were soon added to the vernacular, with the Department of Homeland Security even defining the terms.

But silencing conservatives would require more than merely labeling their speech as disinformation, so the various elements of the Censorship Complex deployed what they called “the added element of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, with Clinton amplifying this message and blaming the spread of social media misinformation for her loss.

Priming the public to connect “disinformation” with Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election allowed the Censorship Complex to frame demands for censorship as patriotic: a fight against foreign influence to save democracy!

The Censorship Complex Expands

The Censorship Complex’s push to silence speech under the guise of preventing disinformation and election interference hit its stride in 2017, when FBI Director Christopher Wray launched the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) purportedly “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.”

The “most widely reported” foreign influence operations these days, Wray said, “are attempts by adversaries — hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States — to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” Wray’s statement perfectly echoed the claims Clinton and Democrats had peddled ad nauseam in the press, and it foreshadowed how the Censorship Complex would soon mature.

The launch of the FITF in 2017 brought together numerous representatives from the deep state. The FBI’s Counterintelligence, Cyber, Criminal, and Counterterrorism Divisions worked closely with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, as well as “state and local enforcement partners and election officials.”

Significantly, the FITF viewed “strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing,” as crucial to combatting foreign disinformation. That perspective led to the FBI’s hand-in-glove relationship with Twitter, which included monthly and then weekly meetings with the tech giant, some of which CIA representatives attended. This symbiotic relationship also led to the censorship of important — and true — political speech, such as the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, which exposed the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandal right before a critical presidential election.

State Department Renovates Its Wing

In 2011, by executive order, the Department of State established the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to support government agencies’ communications “targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.” While renamed the Global Engagement Center in 2016, the center’s counterterrorism mission remained largely unchanged. But then at the end of that year, Congress expanded the Global Engagement Center’s authority, directing it “to address other foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation activities.” And with language straight out of the Russia hoax playbook, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further refined the Global Engagement Center’s mission:

The purpose of the Center shall be to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.

Together, the State Department and the many intelligence agencies behind the FITF worked not just with Twitter but with the array of tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, pushing for censorship of supposed mis-, dis-, and mal-information. But the deep state was not alone. The “disinformation” contagion also reached the Hill, nonprofits, think tanks, and academic institutions with both politics and a desire to suckle at the federal teat driving a frenzied expansion of the project. Together these groups pushed for even more silencing of their opponents, and the Censorship Complex boomed.

The danger Eisenhower warned the country of in 1961 is mild in comparison to the threat of the Censorship Complex. Unlike the military-industrial complex that reached only one function of the federal government, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you and your fellow Americans on every topic.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Political

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Massachusetts Democrat Faces Calls to Step Down After Suggesting Disabled Children Be Aborted

By: Madeline Leesman | February 24, 2023 11:15 AM

A Democrat official in Massachusetts is facing backlash and being pressured to step down after he reportedly complained about the cost of special education for children with disabilities who are not aborted. The official, Michael Hugo, is chair of the Framingham Democratic Committee, according to Fox News. At a recent city council meeting, Hugo reportedly claimed that pro-life pregnancy centers misdiagnose defects in babies before they are born. As a result, babies with disabilities end up being born and become a burden on school budgets.

In a video of the meeting obtained by Fox, Hugo said: “Our fear is that if an unqualified sonographer misdiagnoses a heart defect, an organ defect, spina bifida or an encephalopathic defect, that becomes a very local issue because our school budget will have to absorb the cost of a child in special education, supplying lots and lots of special services to children who were born with the defect.”

Members of his party slammed his remarks, with one claiming Hugo “went off the rails.”

“I’m a lifetime member of the Democratic Committee, and the person who wanted to represent us went off the rails in a different direction that had never been brought before the committee,” Patrick Dunne, who is also a former School Committee and Town Meeting member, said, according to MetroWest Daily News. “We are not talking about eliminating special ed students, we are talking about getting out good information to the people in Framingham, and he is casting a net a bit too wide for me.”

City Council member Adam Steiner said that he was “disappointed and saddened” by the remarks, according to Daily Mail.

“Unfortunately, there has been a long history of arguments in our town/city pitting the needs of particular students against the financial constraints of the Framingham budget,” Steiner wrote. “In the context of reproductive freedom and abortion rights, making this connection was totally unacceptable and disturbing.”

And, Fox News reported that Hugo sent a letter to city council members hours before making his remarks. In the preview of his remarks, Hugo reportedly asked if the state would “cover the medical costs for a fetus that had a sound medical reason to be terminated.”

After 10 days of backlash and calls to resign from members of his party and parents of special needs children, Hugo issued an apology.

“I am writing to offer my most sincere and humble apology to members of the Framingham Democratic Committee, but more especially my fellow members of Framingham’s disability family community, for comments that I made at the last City Council meeting which were offensive and hurtful,” he reportedly wrote.

Laura Green, a disability advocate from Framingham, told Fox News that she felt like his apology was “generic and lackluster.”

“I feel like after a statement like that is made, you can’t just pretend that it didn’t happen or take it back because it’s damaging to a community of people,” she said. “The disability community is the only minority group that you can become a part of at any time.”

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, told Fox News that “this is discrimination plain and simple.”

“I think people who say that the sick cost too much for our society better find the fountain of youth real quick because someday that’s going to be them, it’s going to be their family members,” Hawkins said. Her two children have cystic fibrosis.

“This is eugenics, this is eugenics in 2023 America, this is an argument that sadly we’ve heard before and throughout American history, just regurgitated using a bunch of fancy lingo or support for abortion,” Hawkins added.

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Political

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abortion

‘There’s the Lie’: Chemical Expert Identifies What Officials Are Wrong About in East Palestine

By: Leah Barkoukis | February 24, 2023 9:45 AM

Following the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals earlier this month, residents were temporarily evacuated so a controlled burn could take place. But according to one chemical expert who traveled to the beleaguered town to conduct an independent analysis of the soil, air, and water, that’s a “lie.”

He said one of the ways to determine whether there’s been exposure is whether there’s an odor. Many residents reported noxious smells, which they said caused headaches and other problems like nausea, rashes, burning eyes, and more.

Thousands of fish and other wildlife also died in the days following the burn.

“My view is that it was a bad decision to release it and burn it,” Petty said, adding that all that’s been tested for so far are VOCs, which is “not a specific chemical.”

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A post shared by Real News, Not Bullshit (@realnewsnobullshit)

Petty, who’s been an expert witness in many top environmental class action lawsuits in the U.S., claimed the government is measuring “things that don’t really matter.”

“What I want to know is vinyl chloride. What is the individual component? So, they purposefully measure with a cheaper instrument total hydrocarbons, but I want to know what the components are.”

“The public can handle negative news, they just want the truth,” Petty said. “It’s not wrong to tell them we don’t know yet.”

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Political

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Direc-Woke TV

A.F. BRANCO | on February 24, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/

Woke DirecTV is censoring conservative-leaning news channels like NewsMax and OAN while leaving left-wing news alone.

DirecTV and NewsMax — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

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Political

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Black Panthers-linked Marxist professor just found out that she is the descendant of a slave owner and a Mayflower settler — and can’t handle the news

By: JOSEPH MACKINNON | February 23, 2023

**Image source: Twitter video, @HenryLouisGates – Screenshot**

Angela Davis is a Marxist University of California professor who won the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize and was once accused of supplying weapons to a black supremacist who went on to murder Superior Court Judge Harold Haley and two inmates. The 79-year-old identitarian, one of the founders of critical race theory and a former Black Panther, was shocked to learn on Tuesday’s episode of PBS’ “Finding Your Roots” that she is the descendant of a slave owner as well as of one of America’s first settlers.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of the documentary television series that explores guests’ genealogies, provided the geriatric communist with a list of the passengers on the Mayflower. Among the 101 people aboard the ship that sailed to the colonies in 1620 was one of Davis’ ancestors, William Brewster. Davis appeared unwilling to process the information, saying, “No, I can’t believe this. No! My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower. … No. No, no, no, no. … Oof. That’s a little bit too much.”

Gates interrupted Davis’ protest to ask, “Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you may have descended from people who laid the foundation for this country?”

Davis previously suggested that “racism is embedded in the fabric of this country.”

“Never. Never. Never. Never,” Davis told Gates.

According to Gates, on her mother’s side, Davis descends from a Revolutionary War soldier, Stephen Darden, who was a drummer for the 4th Virginia regiment in the 1770s. Darden reportedly moved to Georgia and became a slave owner.

Gates indicated that Davis’ father, Benjamin Frank Davis, was aware that his father was a white man, Murphy Jones. Jones and Davis’ paternal grandmother, Mollie Spencer — who was born into slavery in 1824 on a Marengo County cotton plantation — had as many as four children together.

Davis, originally from Birmingham, Alabama, said, “I always imagined my ancestors as the people who were enslaved. My mind and my heart are swirling with all of these contradictory emotions.”

Some of the contradictory emotions may have been the result of the decades she has spent engaged in leftist and racial activism.

The Bulwark reported that the woke academic and Israel critic revealed by PBS to be the descendant of a slave owner was not only formerly a member of the violent Black Panther Party and a student of the totalitarian professor Herbert Marcuse, but a leader of the American Communist Party.

In response to Alan Dershowitz’s request to support political prisoners of the communists in the Eastern bloc, Davis allegedly responded that “they are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.”

Russian writer Vitaly Korotich reportedly suggested that Davis, called a “dangerous terrorist” by former President Richard Nixon, had ultimately served as “a useful tool for the Brezhnev government, used to bolster Communist ideals and speak out against the West during the Cold War.”

The Marxist professor continued criticizing the United States long after the Cold War ended, stating in a 2017 speech, “This is a country anchored in slavery and colonialism, which means for better or for worse the very history of the United States is a history of immigration and enslavement.”

Upon learning of her family’s history, Davis told Gates, “I’m glad on the one hand that we’ve begun to solve this mystery. We have something that we didn’t have before. But at the same time I think it makes me even more connected to struggling for a better world.”

“Do you know what you’re looking at? That is a list of the passengers on the Mayflower.”

Our researchers discovered #AngelaDavis’s ancestors traveled to the US on the Mayflower and here is her reaction. #FindingYourRoots pic.twitter.com/G2HhA9BSrT
— Henry Louis Gates Jr (@HenryLouisGates) February 22, 2023

Michael Young, a visiting fellow at the Center for Renewing America, noted on Twitter that while shocking to Davis, the revelations about her past revealed “that even the most hardened and radical woke activists have a history that is far more complicated than their own ideology allows for. Davis is (by her own standard) a colonizer, and (by her own standard) an oppressed minority.”

“The important insight is that Angela Davis’ own life is proof that the history of Americans does not fit into the intersectional categories of race and gender woke activists want to sort people into,” said Young, adding, “Wokeness wants to divide us into oppressor and oppressed according to our ancestry, or skin color, or other qualities. But Angela Davis [sic] own life shows that the world is far to complicated for that, and none of our bloodlines are exempt from the sins of history.”

Wokeness wants to divide us into oppressor and oppressed according to our ancestry, or skin color, or other qualities. But Angela Davis own life shows that the world is far to complicated for that, and none of our bloodlines are exempt from the sins of history.
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) February 22, 2023

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Political

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Canada considers allowing assisted suicide for children without parental consent

By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter | February 23, 2023

A parliamentary committee has called for expanding Canada’s assisted suicide program so that “mature minors” whose deaths are “reasonably foreseeable” be allowed to hasten their deaths without parental consent.

The Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying presented its report last week for discussion in the House of Commons, recommending that minors should be eligible for doctor-assisted suicide. Minors “deemed to have the requisite decision-making capacity upon assessment” should be eligible for the country’s Medical Assistance in Dying Program (MAID), the report states in a list of 23 recommendations.

The committee urged the Canadian government to “undertake consultations with minors on the topic of MAID, including minors with terminal illnesses, minors with disabilities, minors in the child welfare system and Indigenous minors, within five years of the tabling of this report.”

MOVE OVER MOLECH and Margerete Sanger. Canada wants to abort children at any age simply because they deem them less than “normal”.

The report also recommended that parental consent is not always necessary in certain cases if a minor is eligible for assisted suicide.

“That the Government of Canada establish a requirement that, where appropriate, the parents or guardians of a mature minor be consulted in the course of the assessment process for MAID, but that the will of a minor who is found to have the requisite decision-making capacity ultimately take priority,” Recommendation 19 in the report reads.

While the report recommended expanding MAID to minors, it called for restricting it to only young people whose death is “reasonably foreseeable.”

The report did not propose an age limit for assisted suicide, stating “eligibility for MAID should not be denied on the basis of age alone.” Regarding parental consent, the final report recommends parents be consulted “where appropriate.”

The majority of the committee’s members called for the government to hold formal consultations with Canadians under 18 within the next five years and to provide funding for research into the issue of minors being eligible for MAID. In addition, the committee called for the creation of an independent expert panel to evaluate the criminal code provisions in MAID for “mature minors” within five years.

Recommendation 22 calls on the Canadian government to “work with provinces and territories, regulatory authorities, provincial and territorial law societies and stakeholders to adopt the necessary safeguards for advance requests.”

Conservative members of Parliament objected to the proposal to expand MAID eligibility to minors, highlighting how decision-making capacities, even for mature young people, remain questionable. Citing Dr. Maria Alisha Montes, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics, the report states: “I would argue that MAID for mature minors carries the highest amount of risk, as the consequence is death.”

“It’s irreversible,” Montes wrote. “We need to ask ourselves if we should be legalizing this for mature minors when biology shows us that the ability to balance risks and rewards is one of the last areas of the brain to mature.”

As The Christian Post reported, Canada legalized doctor-assisted suicide in 2016 but was limited to citizens or permanent residents at least 18 years old with “a serious and incurable disease, illness or disability” that included “enduring and intolerable suffering.”

Canadian Parliament expanded the law in 2022 to patients with non-threatening physical disabilities, intending to offer assisted suicide to people with mental illness by March before the Canadian government announced a temporary delay in December.

MAID provider Dr. Madeline Li, who has overseen hundreds of patients hasten their deaths through the program, recently expressed concerns that MAID has gone too far and is “missing fundamental safeguards for vulnerable people.”

In an op-ed published earlier this month by the Canadian magazine Maclean’s, Li voiced disapproval towards offering assisted suicide to people with mental illnesses or patients with curable conditions that refuse care.

The provider recalled a cancer patient determined eligible for MAID despite his condition having a 65% chance of a cure. The MAID assessors approved his case just because the patient declined care and had a “grievous and irremediable condition.”

“[I]t was irremediable because they didn’t want the treatments available. That’s what the law currently states: as long as the patient doesn’t want the treatment, their condition is considered irremediable — even if there are effective treatments,” she wrote.

“But not treating a cancer with such a high chance of cure goes against medical practice standards. The doctors involved had a lot of moral distress about this person’s request for MAID. This person signed consent for me to share their story, but I feel differently about it than they did. They saw it as an expression of their autonomy; I saw it as dystopian.”

Canada wouldn’t be the first country to legalize assisted suicide for minors, as the Netherlands and Belgium have allowed the practice. In the Netherlands, children 12 and older can request assisted suicide but must have parental consent unless they are 16 and older. In Belgium, children must have a terminal disease or be near death. They must also have the consent of their parents.

Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: samantha.kamman@christianpost.com. Follower her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman

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Jake Tapper says Nikki Haley’s campaign exposes the ‘very ugly side’ of liberals — and predicts race-based attacks will backfire

By: CHRIS ENLOE | February 23, 2023

CNN anchor Jake Tapper pointed out on Tuesday that Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign has exposed a “very ugly side of the left.” One liberal pundit in particular — New York Times writer Wajahat Ali — has repeatedly attacked Haley, targeting both her name and race.

For example, Ali accused Haley of using her “brown skin to launder” white supremacy.

“She uses her brown skin as a weapon against poor black folks and poor brown folks, and she uses her brown skin to launder white supremacist talking points,” he said on MSNBC. “And the reason why I feel sad is because no matter what she does, maybe, it’ll never be enough. They’ll never love her.”

Haley is also being attacked for using her middle name, “Nikki,” instead of her birth name, Nimarata. In fact, Ali has emphasized that point repeatedly, ironically misspelling Haley’s name as “Nimrata” in the process.

Tapper observed that the same people upset at people emphasizing Barack Obama’s middle name are now using Haley’s Indian heritage against her.

“These are the same people who objected to whenever Republicans would say Barack Hussein Obama,” he said. “I mean, there is a very ugly sign of the left that comes out when Nikki Haley runs for office.”

Tapper’s guests agreed.

“Yes, I think that it’s a gift to Haley’s nascent campaign for her to be able to jump on these dumb remarks,” said conservative commentator Ramesh Ponnuru, “that just play into her hands and say, ‘Look, they’re going after me based on my race. They can’t handle my ideas. They can’t handle the fact that I’m a skilled politician.'”

Democratic strategist Paul Begala added, “I think the fact that she got to be the governor of South Carolina with brown skin is a very impressive accomplishment, and I don’t think it’s something people ought to be attacking or ridiculing her about. Let’s just take her based on her ideas. And I might not like them as a Democrat, Republicans might, but I think it’s a terrible thing to say about her.”

Tapper called the race-based attacks “in-kind contributions,” referring to non-monetary political contributions, that will ultimately benefit Haley.

Ali responded to the criticism by bemoaning that there was no critical pushback on some of Haley’s previous positions.

However, what Ali himself missed is that his comments making light of Haley’s heritage were also not a critical engagement of the substance of Haley’s politics. And that was the exact point on which the bipartisan CNN panel agreed.

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Buttigieg Finally Visited East Palestine. It Didn’t Go Well.

By: Katie Pavlich | February 23, 2023 12:45 PM

Nearly three weeks after a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, former failed mayor and current Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg finally visited the town today and took a tour of potentially contaminated areas. It didn’t go well.

Pete Buttigieg is escorted away from media while his press secretary makes herself known & says she’ll answer questions for him – but only if she isn’t recorded on camera…@TPUSA | @DrewHLive pic.twitter.com/sM12BEfJMi
— Rebecca Brannon (@RebsBrannon) February 23, 2023

Pete Buttigieg mispronounces "East Palestine" while making a veiled challenge to Donald Trump after his visit to the Ohio town yesterday. pic.twitter.com/msohMstJXw
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 23, 2023

PETE BUTTIGIEG: "Sorry, I lost my train of thought." pic.twitter.com/ynz6RD0buv
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 23, 2023

During a press conference on scene, Buttigieg was repeatedly asked why it took so long for him to show up and about his rhetoric downplaying the situation.

REPORTER: "Should you have come a little sooner?"

PETE BUTTIGIEG: "I'm trying to strike the right balance." pic.twitter.com/TotjwSK4xR
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 23, 2023

Buttigieg, in typical fashion, attempted to blame shift with a false narrative about deregulation under President Donald Trump.

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NTSB Releases Initial Findings From East Palestine Train Derailment

By: Spencer Brown | February 23, 2023 1:25 PM

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released its preliminary report on the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Thursday morning, providing more information on how the disaster developed.

“On February 3, 2023, about 8:54 p.m. local time, eastbound Norfolk Southern Railway (NS) general merchandise freight train 32N derailed 38 railcars on main track 1 of the NS Fort Wayne Line of the Keystone Division in East Palestine, Ohio,” the NTSB report reiterated. “The derailed equipment included 11 tank cars carrying hazardous materials that subsequently ignited, fueling fires that damaged an additional 12 non-derailed railcars.”

The train was composed of two head-end locomotives, 149 railcars, and one distributed power locomotive located between railcars 109 and 110. Of the 149 railcars, 20 were “placarded hazardous materials tank cars transporting combustible liquids, flammable liquids, and flammable gas, including vinyl chloride,” the preliminary report explained. The train was traveling roughly 47 miles per hour when it derailed, less than the maximum authorized speed of 50 miles per hour, and the positive train control system was enabled an in operating order when the accident took place, according to the NTSB.

Here’s how things literally went off the rails:

Train 32N was operating with a dynamic brake application as the train passed a wayside defect detector on the east side of Palestine, Ohio, at milepost (MP) 49.81. The wayside defect detector, or hot bearing detector (HBD), transmitted a critical audible alarm message instructing the crew to slow and stop the train to inspect a hot axle. The train engineer increased the dynamic brake application to further slow and stop the train. During this deceleration, an automatic emergency brake application initiated, and train 32N came to a stop.

After the train stopped, the crew observed fire and smoke and notified the Cleveland East dispatcher of a possible derailment. With dispatcher authorization, the crew applied handbrakes to the two railcars at the head of the train, uncoupled the head-end locomotives, and moved the locomotives about 1 mile from the uncoupled railcars. Responders arrived at the derailment site and began response efforts.

According to the NTSB, this “increase in temperature suggested that the vinyl chloride was undergoing a polymerization reaction, which could pose an explosion hazard.” So, “[r]esponders scheduled a controlled venting of the five vinyl chloride tank cars to release and burn the vinyl chloride, expanded the evacuation zone to a 1-mile by 2- mile area, and dug ditches to contain released vinyl chloride liquid while it vaporized and burned. The controlled venting began about 4:40 p.m. on February 6 and continued for several hours,” the NTSB reported.

Since the derailment, the NTSB said it has collected the “wheel bearing and affected wheelset” as well as the “vinyl chloride tank car top fittings, including the relief valves.”

The ongoing NTSB probe will “focus on the wheelset and bearing; tank car design and derailment damage; a review of the accident response, including the venting and burning of the vinyl chloride; railcar design and maintenance procedures and practices; NS use of wayside defect detectors; and NS railcar inspection practices,” according to the investigators.

NTSB issues preliminary report on Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio: https://t.co/urnInBf9uH
Investigation: https://t.co/sPOVrteqkW pic.twitter.com/g6EJTxBHTO
— NTSB Newsroom (@NTSB_Newsroom) February 23, 2023

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: Nikki Haley Offers Moral Instruction to U.S.

February 22, 2023 by Ann Coulter

Nikki Haley Offers Moral Instruction to U.S.

Nikki Haley’s announcement that she was running for president reminded me of my lifelong dream to move to India, so I can boss around Indians and tell them to stop worshipping cows and rats. That was the main point of what I said on the Mark Simone radio show last week, which was promptly chopped up, fed into a computer, translated into German, then into Urdu, back to English and finally came out in endless headlines, to sound like a MAGA moron: Go back to your own country, lady!

No, actually, I was making an obvious point I’ve been making for some time now. To wit: It’s bad enough when 11th-generation Americans disrespect our country, but enraging when recent arrivals do.

By “recent arrivals,” I mean anyone whose ancestors came to America after 1800.

At that point, America had already been around for two centuries. We had conquered a dangerous wilderness, battled savages, brought Christianity to the natives, divided ourselves into states, fought a revolution, drafted a constitution, built a capitol, established colleges and universities (including six of the seven Ivy Leagues), were about to fight a bloody Civil War to end slavery, and were well on our way to becoming the greatest nation on Earth.

Post-1800 immigrants just kind of showed up. True, many of them were better than the people who already lived here. (Especially the ones who arrived when our greeting was still, “Sink or swim!” instead of, “Here’s your welfare application.”)

Thus, a few years ago, I wrote:

“MSNBC’s smirking Chris Hayes can get weepy about some ancient Roman ruin, and Rachel Maddow about a building in Warsaw, but I care about my history. These savages are smashing and graffitiing my antiquities.”

No one minded that. That’s because only the most recent of recent arrivals, from the most dissonant cultures, are sacred beings to the left. (Sacred cows?) As Bill Clinton’s director of the census once said, maybe it’s about time the “Western majority” do “some assimilation of its own.”

One of those better-than-us recent arrivals was Louis Brandeis, born to Jewish immigrants from Central Europe. He went on to become a Supreme Court justice and have a university named after him.

This is what Brandeis said, in 1915, on “Americanization Day” [REPORTED TO THE AUTHORITIES] about the process of becoming an American:

“However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done, will he possess the national consciousness of an American.”

A big part of that “harmony” is understanding the amazing way this country dealt with the losers of our two major national conflicts: the war(s) with the Indians and the Civil War. We should be on our knees thanking God both those wars came out the way they did or, today, America would be a backward, third world hellhole.

Both the Indians and Confederates were part of a bygone culture, mostly illiterate, and unable to manufacture anything, much less feed and clothe a transcontinental nation of more than 300 million people. Thanks to the superior culture and technology of Protestant New England and the Midwest, the Confederates and Indians never really stood a chance.

But they fought like banshees [REPORTED!], and we honor them for their breathtaking courage and nobility.

Every macho thing in America is — or was, until about five minutes ago — named after either American Indians or Confederates — e.g., the Apache and Comanche attack helicopters, the Braves, the Redskins, the Indians, Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Fort Gordon, Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Hood, Fort Lee, Fort Pickett, Fort Polk, Fort Rucker and on and on and on.

Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman got his middle name from a Shawnee warrior chief admired by his father. Paratroopers who jumped into Normandy cut their hair to look like Mohawks and shouted “Geronimo!” as they leapt.

Sometimes, it seems like everybody in America is boasting about Indian heritage — like Elizabeth Warren — or displaying the rebel flag. See, e.g., OutKast, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” Lynyrd Skynyrd, and tiles in the Times Square subway station honoring former New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs — “a Southerner with strong ties to the Confederacy,” according to Civil War historian Dr. David Jackowe.

Sitting Bull became a celebrity, signing autographs and performing with Annie Oakley. (My direct ancestor was a stand-in for Oakley and may have performed with Sitting Bull.)

No other country’s internal wars have ever concluded this way. The usual method of ending a domestic conflict is with ceaseless guerrilla warfare and total humiliation of the defeated.

Yale professor David Blight sneers at the “Lost Cause” expression, calling it “an interpretation of the American Civil War viewed by most historians as a myth that attempts to preserve the honour of the South.”

Oh, how awful. We’d just ended a bloody Civil War with 600,000 dead … Job No. 1: Keep picking at the scab!

David Blight, marriage counselor: Every day, discuss what you hate about each other.

My ancestors were Union soldiers who fought the Confederates. My ancestors were killed by American Indians — and rescued by others! But I don’t go around whining that maybe I’d have more “generational wealth” or higher SAT scores if only we took down statues of Sitting Bull and Robert E. Lee.

Their history is my country’s history. And it’s a history to be proud of — precisely for how the losers were treated. If you don’t understand that, I don’t think you’re really trying to bring yourself into “complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations.”

Again, such ignorance is disgusting coming from Mayflower descendants. But it is beyond galling to have a second-generation immigrant like Haley sanctimoniously take down the Confederate flag, which she did as governor of South Carolina. How about going back and critiquing the Indian culture she’s constantly boasting of? You know, the country where a majority still revere cows, others worship rats, and which has more slaves today than any other nation on Earth.

Whatever else possessing “the national consciousness of an American” entails, it surely includes not being sublimely ignorant of the total awesomeness of the country you’re currently living in.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Helter Stelter

A.F. BRANCO | on February 23, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-helter-stelter/

Brian Stelter was fired for much less than Don Lemon. Being Black and gay a protected class at CNN?

Brian Stelter vs Don Lemon — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

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As Seattle Settles Major Lawsuit, Media Still Insist George Floyd Riots Were ‘Mostly Peaceful’

BY: MARK HEMINGWAY | FEBRUARY 22, 2023

CNN "fiery but mostly peaceful" protest chyron as reporter talks in front of Kenosha's burning buildings

After the death of George Floyd, leaders in Democratic cities across the country, who were alternately scared and desperate to virtue signal, refused to take action while the ensuing riots and looting did billions of dollars in damage to city centers across the U.S. And amid many callous and inept responses to the crisis, Seattle is a leading contender for the locality that handled things the worst.

Today, the city agreed to settle a lawsuit in federal district court that alleged the city violated the civil rights of several business owners after it ordered police to withdraw from a section of its Capitol Hill neighborhood and let protesters set up their own lawless “autonomous zone.” The area became alternately known as either the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) or Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). This left business owners in the areas completely abandoned as law and order broke down — without a police presence, there was rampant violence, drug markets, and literal armed warlords patrolling the streets.

The settlement comes after a federal judge levied major sanctions on the city for apparently deleting thousands of text messages involving, among others, the city’s former mayor and police chief relating to their handling of the autonomous zone. The notion that city officials had something to hide here is certainly at odds with the rhetoric during the month the city abandoned the business owners in the CHAZ.

Former Mayor Jenny Durkan went on CNN and said what was happening in the CHAZ was “a block party atmosphere.” “We could have the summer of love,” she said. When Trump lambasted the city for abandoning law and order, this resulted in a defensive Twitter spat between Durkan and the former president, and Gov. Jay Inslee told Trump to “stay out of Washington state’s business.”

Not that there was ever any doubt, but with Seattle settling this lawsuit it’s now impossible to argue that city officials weren’t encouraging violence and guilty of abdicating their most basic responsibility to keep citizens safe. Or is it? If you’re wondering who would be so desperate to cling to a political narrative they would insist letting anarchists take control of your city wasn’t so bad, well, here’s today’s Seattle Times write-up featuring an epic “challenge accepted” moment:

While CHOP was mostly peaceful, there were instances of vandalism and sporadic outbreaks of violence, including fights, an attempt to torch the abandoned police precinct and at least four shootings that claimed two lives of two teenagers, including a 16-year-old boy whose death led the city to end the protest.

That’s right, other than the fights, shootings, multiple homicides, and an attempt to burn a police station to the ground, it was “mostly peaceful,” says the local newspaper. Who among us wouldn’t mistake what was going on here for a “summer of love”?

The media’s suspicious coalescing around the phrase “mostly peaceful” to describe the Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 was always transparently dishonest. The CNN chyron declaring the protests in Kenosha “mostly peaceful” as the city was in flames in the background is now iconic.

However, it is truly astonishing that two years later a major newspaper is still clinging to this phrase like some talisman they hope will ward off holding their local leaders responsible for, among many other crimes, facilitating the deaths of two young black men.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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Buttigieg’s Message To East Palestine Residents in Ohio: ‘I’m Taking Some Personal Time’

BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 22, 2023

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is too busy taking walks to address the unfurling environmental and health crises caused by a train derailment and subsequent hazardous chemical burn in Ohio earlier this month. At least, that’s what he told the Daily Caller’s Jennie Taer when asked if he had anything to say to the people in East Palestine, Ohio, who are “suffering right now” after a train carrying toxic chemicals veered off the tracks. The train cars were later deliberately set ablaze, which disseminated a noxious plume of black smoke that was spotted from miles away.

“Well, I would refer you to about a dozen interviews I’ve given today. And if you’d like to arrange a conversation, make sure to reach out to our press office. I’m not going to have that conversation just walking down the street here,” Buttigieg said.

After Taer once again pressed Buttigieg to offer a message to Ohioans, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, made it clear he was not interested in addressing crises that fall under his jurisdiction while off the clock.

“I’m going to refer you to the comments that I made to the press because right now I’m taking some personal time and I’m walking down the street,” Buttigieg insisted.

I asked Secretary Buttigieg about the crisis in East Palestine and I guess he didn’t like that so he took a pic of me. Im just doing my job, sir. @DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/HjKNgF25FJ
— Jennie Taer (@JennieSTaer) February 22, 2023

What Buttigieg didn’t mention in the brief sidewalk conversation, however, is that he didn’t speak up about the calamity until nearly three weeks after the initial derailment. By then, residents all over Ohio had complained of contaminated air and water sparking sickness that rapidly spread through their families, friends, and pets, and killed the surrounding wildlife.

In his first public comments since the Feb. 3 disaster, Buttigieg admitted on Monday that he “could have spoken out sooner.” Yet he still failed to share specific plans on how he will help the locals affected by the derailment or when he will visit the site of the transportation calamity.

“I am very interested in getting to know the residents of East Palestine, hearing from them about how they’ve been impacted and communicating with them about the steps that we’re taking,” Buttigieg said on a conference call with the press. “When the time is right, I do plan to visit East Palestine. I don’t have a date for you right now.”

Despite repeated calls from Ohioans and the mayor of East Palenstine for the transportation secretary to visit the afflicted site and address residents’ ongoing concerns, Buttigieg once again confirmed on Tuesday that he has not set a date for a trip.

“Are you going down there at all?” Taer asked during their exchange.

“Yep, I am,” Buttigieg replied.

“When are you going?” Taer pressed.

“I’ll share that when I’m ready,” Buttigieg said.

Train derailments in Ohio and other states are just one of the many scandals plaguing the cabinet member, who seemingly got the job under Biden’s affirmative-action hiring model based on his sexual preferences, not his transportation experience.

During the peak of the nation’s supply-chain woes in the fall of 2021 and negotiations over a trillion-dollar infrastructure package, Buttigieg was nowhere to be found. Instead of taking any responsibility to respond to the crises that fall under his job title, Buttigeg ducked important calls and meetings, using his eight-week-long paternity leave as an excuse. When the taxpayers who fund his salary complained about his prolonged absence, Buttigieg and his husband Chasten called it “old news” and characterized the criticism as unfair.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Is Munchausen syndrome by proxy driving kids to identify as trans? Psychiatrists answer

By Brandon Showalter, Senior Investigative Reporter | February 22, 2023

As the debate over transgender medicalization erupts nationwide and more states pass laws banning the mutilation of adolescents’

bodies, one largely unanswered question remains: Why are so many mothers trans-ing their children?

Sometimes called “Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” the term refers to a disorder in which a parent draws attention to themselves by projecting a disease or psychological condition onto their child even though the child is not unwell.

According to psychiatrists interviewed by The Christian Post, these are indeed complex phenomena. The family dynamics and factors at play, particularly when a parent is psychologically unstable and might be trans-ing their child to gain attention, even if such cases are believed to be rare, are worthy of discussion.

Dr. Miriam Grossman, author of the forthcoming book Lost in TransNation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness, told The Christian Post that the terms Munchausen’s syndrome and “Munchausen’s by proxy” are no longer cited in professional journals. In today’s psychiatric literature, these syndromes are referred to as “factitious disorders.” The by-proxy cases are factitious disorders that are imposed on another person, including the imposition of gender confusion onto children, Grossman added.

According to the medical history journal Versailus, the term Munchausen, which was used to define this mental disorder, was coined in 1951 by Richard Asher after a German man named Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, also known as Baron Münchhausen, and was based on a fictional character whose name had become proverbial as the narrator of false and hyperbolic tall tales. Such tall tales were a feature in the German writer Rudolf Erich Rapse’s 1785 novel Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia.

“When it’s a plain factitious disorder, it’s a person who either makes up or exaggerates medical symptoms, and that may sometimes involve falsifying medical tests,” Grossman told CP.

A factitious disorder by proxy includes the falsification of physical or psychological signs or symptoms or induction of injury or distress in another person where the individual presents the victim to others as being ill or injured, she continued, adding that an example of this is putting sugar in a urine sample to present oneself as a diabetic.

Such tampering with urine has been known to happen. In 1977, British pediatrician Dr. Roy Meadow published one such account in the Lancet of a mother who had done so with her 6-year-old daughter Kay’s urine to make her appear to be ill. This mother had also fed her 14-month-old son high doses of salt for the same reason. Between bouts of these attacks of sickness, the very young boy was, the doctor noted, otherwise “healthy and developing normally.”

Meadow’s cautiously written landmark article, “Munchausen Syndrome, The Hinterland of Child Abuse,” documents that the 14-month-old ultimately died of salt poisoning and that an autopsy showed gastric erosions “as if a chemical had been ingested.”

Since that time, a body of literature has emerged on this subject and the mental disorder has been analyzed in other journals and news articles. Examples include a 2004 feature story in the New Yorker titled, “The Bad Mother,” and a book published in 2000 titled, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy Abuse: A Practical Approach. It has even been referred to in pop culture. Rapper Eminem’s 2002 single “Cleaning Out My Closet” mentions being a victim of this syndrome. In 2003, the first known memoir written by a victim of this abuse, titled Sickened by Julie Gregory, was published.

This deceptive behavior that accompanies factitious disorders is evident even in the absence of external rewards. Such an external reward might be a large outpouring of sympathy and attention following a diagnosis, perhaps even generous financial assistance to help with the costs of fighting the disease.

In October 2017, the journal Child Abuse & Neglect published an article titled “The perpetrators of medical child abuse (Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy) — A systematic review of 796 cases” that detailed the findings of researchers Gregory Yates and Christopher Bass who examined hundreds of cases involving this psychiatric condition.

Yates and Bass found that nearly all of the abusers were female (97.6%) and about that same percentage were the victims’ own mothers (95.6%). Approximately three-fourths of the abusers were married and the mean caretaker age when the child presented with some sort of illness was 27.6 years. In nearly half of all cases reviewed, the perpetrators of the abuse were reported to be in a healthcare-related profession (45.6%). And nearly a quarter of those who had medically abused children had obstetric complications (23.5%) or had histories of childhood maltreatment (30%).

Of the hundreds of cases reviewed, the most common psychiatric diagnoses documented were self-imposed factitious disorders (30.9%), personality disorders (18.6%), and depression (14.2%).

Factitious disorders are indeed admittedly strange.

“Most of us don’t want to be ill and we don’t want the people we care for to be ill. It is very odd,” explained Grossman. “But the mind does some really odd things and in the case of a parent who would do this to a child, they have significant emotional problems. What is it that they’re seeking here? They’re seeking attention and validation. And they’re doing it by victimizing their child.”

“To try and understand that you’d have to try and understand the history of the parent, who the parent is, what sort of emotional disorders they’re struggling with, what sort of inner emotional issues. Were they neglected as a child?”

While there has been growing awareness of how trans identities are spreading rapidly among youth, especially among women in their 20s, teens, and younger via a peer contagion — which was thoroughly explored in Lisa Littman’s study, titled “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria,” published in Plos One in 2018 — what has gone unexamined is if a concurrent social contagion is happening among parents of trans-identifying children. And is this spreading among a subset of parents who crave attention and claim to have a gender-dysphoric child?

At this point, Grossman believes it’s merely speculation, but that it is nevertheless a reasonable question to consider.

“It’s fair to ask if perhaps [this is happening] among parents who are trying very hard to be what’s now being called ‘woke’ or whether a parent who is well-intentioned and who wants the best for their child but notices certain behaviors. And these days we’re being led to believe that almost anything could be related to being transgender: if a child doesn’t fit in, a child who is unhappy with their body, a child that has trouble making friends or is withdrawn,” Grossman offered. “Even the most well-intentioned parent who simply wants to help their child, it certainly may cross their mind. Maybe this (transgenderism) is the issue.”

Dr. Roger Hiatt, a child and adolescent psychiatrist based in Tennessee who is also licensed to practice in Arkansas and has an office in the town of West Memphis, is convinced there are parents who indisputably push gender ideology and experimental medicalization on their children: puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and body mutilating surgeries. Yet, from his experience, for every parent who is clearly driving this agenda with their child, there are probably 10 more who’ve been misled by groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics or the Pediatric Endocrine Society, which have both rubber-stamped the “affirmation-only” model and publicly opposed state legislative efforts to curtail the experimental medical practices.

Hiatt has treated over 200 gender dysphoric patients. In the first 15 years of his career, he encountered only two such patients, both of whom were males who identified as females. In the last seven years, however, the vast majority of these patients have been adolescent girls identifying as boys.

“It is definitely true that for every case that I’ve dealt with where I felt like the parent was actively, aggressively pushing the transgender identity there are more than 10 [parents] who are either neutral or very ambivalent about the whole process,” Hiatt recounted in an interview with CP.

“The impression is being portrayed that there is an absolute consensus in the medical community that ‘gender-affirming’ care is the only option that would be appropriate in dealing with a kid who, from the moment they identify themselves as gender-questioning or even transgender then immediately the process unfolds to socially transition them followed by puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones, followed by surgery.”

But despite corporate media repetition, this supposed consensus is “absolutely not” a shared view among most doctors, he insists.

“It’s difficult to attribute motive to a parent in terms of why they do what they do. In terms of a child who is questioning or being actively encouraged to pursue a transgender lifestyle and identity, in my experience those situations, the typical scenario is a mother who encouraged it,” Hiatt said.

The psychiatrist told CP he once saw a case where the parents were divorced, the mother was aggressively pushing the child’s trans identity, and the father was adamantly against it. Although they had joint custody, social institutions such as the hospital and the public school system were actively siding with the mother’s stance that the child must identify as the opposite sex.

Hiatt has seen several patients who have what he described as “medicalized presentation” where a parent — often the mother but it could be either — has been actively inducing or doing things that result in the child needing medical care. The parents who present with this get a “secondary gain,” the benefit of being a parent of a child in medical distress.

These dynamics can also present as gender confusion.

“Once the child has been identified as gender dysphoric or transgender, there is a huge push in much of the medical community to medicalize that child, to address the issue with medical interventions,” he said. “It basically locks in both child and parent to a patient role or the parent of a patient role. And not only for the parent but also for the child there is a secondary gain from that: feeling important or different, unique or special. That absolutely is a factor, not in every case, but in many cases.”

When asked how factitious disorders develop in people and why a parent would want to impose a medical condition on their child, Hiatt stressed that there is an unmistakable delusional component that cannot be ignored.

“The notion that any intervention or group of interventions can actually change a boy to a girl or a girl to a boy is an absolute lie. It’s not even possible. All that can be done is that society can be compelled to treat the patient a certain way. Interventions can take place that can cause physical changes to the body to make the individual appear a certain way. But in the end, it does nothing to the individual chromosomally and they continue to require medical interventions for the rest of their lives if they choose to continue to portray themselves this way,” Hiatt said.

“In terms of where [factitious disorders] come from, it’s multi-factorial. There is almost universally psychological trauma or abuse, depression, anxiety, other mental health issues and concerns that are in the child and typically in the parent as well that in some regards where they feel like ‘Wow, I’ve found a solution to all my problems.’”

Some prominent institutions pushing medicalized gender transition assert that a child will be better off after experimental drugs are prescribed or a patient undergoes sex change operations. Yet because of the distinctly delusional component of the parents’ minds, they genuinely don’t feel like they are doing anything wrong. Indeed, they actually do believe they are helping their child.

Prior to finishing his psychiatry training, Hiatt gave a grand rounds presentation on a condition called Folie à deux, a French phrase meaning “folly of two,” and it is what is known as a shared delusional disorder.

The disorder, first conceptualized in 19th century French psychiatry by Charles Lasègue and Jules Falret, is also known as Lasègue–Falret syndrome. The condition is similar to and equally as unusual as those who believe that their child was born in the wrong body. This rare disorder produces similar social dynamics seen in families with children mired in gender confusion. In this shared delusion disorder, the inducer who has a psychotic disorder operates as the primary actor influencing another person or possibly more, the secondary actors, with delusions based on that delusional belief.

In 2021, Hiatt provided expert testimony in support of Arkansas’ Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, which prohibited prescribing puberty blockers, opposite sex hormones, and performing body mutilating sex-change surgeries on youth who are 18 years old or younger. The bill passed overwhelmingly through both chambers of the state Legislature only to be vetoed by then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson. The Legislature subsequently overrode his veto.

Mere weeks later, as was expected, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the state on behalf of three trans-identifying youth, asserting that the law was unconstitutional. The law is currently being litigated in the courts. Breaking with Hutchinson, then-Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who is now the state’s lieutenant governor, stated that she would defend the law in court.

At the state level, Hiatt firmly believes that laws such as the SAFE Act are necessary and vitally important. Nationally, however, he thinks medical malpractice lawsuits in coming years will probably be required and more effective as many of those who steer children down this destructive path will be reluctant to do so if they know that it will likely result in serious personal financial losses.

The medical establishment in the U.S. has, by and large, adopted and advanced what has become known as the “Dutch protocol.”

As CP reported in 2018, the first thorough study of the drug Triptorelin used as a puberty blocker on a child who was suffering from gender confusion was published out of the Netherlands in 1998 when a pediatric endocrinologist, together with a psychologist, decided to use the medication on a 13-year-old patient.

The rationale was that the 13-year-old should have the drug because the effects of going through puberty would be too traumatic to endure and “pausing” those signals in the brain would give the child time to adjust and then later decide whether to have a series of sex-change surgeries. This approach migrated across the Atlantic in the following years and guidelines favoring the “gender-affirmative” approach became widely accepted within prominent U.S. hospitals and in professional societies such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. The first pediatric gender clinic in the U.S. opened in 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Yet even pioneers of the Dutch protocol, such as Dr. Thomas Steensma, have in recent years criticized the approach of the American medical establishment, noting that the group of young people who doctors in the Netherlands treated in its earlier years was much smaller.

“Where does the large flow of children who have suddenly registered for transgender care since 2013? And what is the quality of life like for this group long after sex change? There is no answer to those questions,” Steensma said in 2021.

“The research on the small group of people from before 2013 may not apply to the large group that there is now. We conduct structural research in the Netherlands. But the rest of the world is blindly adopting our research. Every doctor or psychologist who engages in transgender care should feel the obligation to do a good before-and-after measurement.”

Likewise, Dr. Annelou de Vries, who was part of the same Dutch Protocol collaborative, stressed in an October 2020 commentary for the AAP Pediatrics journal, adolescents with recent-onset gender dysphoria who had no previous no childhood history of gender distress, were not part of their study protocol.

Grossman, who was also interviewed by Matt Walsh in The Daily Wire film “What is a Woman?” notes that her greatest distress is seeing the victims of this mass experiment. In that film, she explains that she received a phone call from a mother whose 14-year-old daughter had been prescribed puberty blockers and, as a result, was dealing with osteoporosis, an ailment that causes brittle bones and is common in senior citizens, not adolescents.

“And we know about the kids being victims but I feel like we don’t talk about the parents being victims,” she said soberly.

Something else is at work, she believes, and that’s a pervasive and sinister anti-male sentiment that indelibly contributes to young boys suffering confusion over their sex.

“Now, I’m not minimizing women who have been treated badly, abused or worse, by men,” Grossman was quick to add, “but overall, there has been a war on men and on boys.”

“We sometimes find that there is a mother who really has a hatred or deep resentment of men because of things that she has gone through earlier in her life. And that without even realizing it she can influence her son to have that same negativity about being male. Children want to please their parents. And more than anything else, children want their parents’ love. And it’s not impossible that a boy might pick up on his mother’s animosity toward men and feel like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be like that.’”

“The boys might be overhearing conversations with the mom, with friends or relatives or what have you. Anti-male kind of stuff and that does not help the boy’s identity of himself as being a male,” she continued.

“That does not help.”

Brandon Showalter has a bachelor’s degree from Bridgewater College in Virginia and a master’s degree from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Listen to Showalter’s Generation Indoctrination podcast at The Christian Post and edifi app Send news tips to: brandon.showalter@christianpost.com Follow on Facebook: BrandonMarkShowalter Follow on Twitter: @BrandonMShow

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: Major German paper reveals Pfizer fabricated clinical trials to cover up deaths

Daniel Horowitz | February 22, 2023

According to new provisional data from the Scottish government, there were 7,314 deaths registered in January 2023, an increase of 17.7% compared to the average of 6,212. For the second week of January, there were more deaths in Scotland than ever before, including during the peak of the pandemic. Concurrently, there were 4,159 births registered in January 2023, a decrease of 6.8% compared to the average of 4,463. In other words, between a dearth of births and a plethora of deaths, there were roughly 1,400 fewer souls, the equivalent of roughly 86,000 in the United States. This is long after COVID. Why is there zero concern?

What on earth will it take to pull these death shots from the market?

Die Welt, a paper based in the home country of Pfizer partner BioNTech, revealed last week in a long expose what many of us have long known. All those sudden deaths, heart attacks, and strokes we’ve been witnessing over the past two years were indeed observed during the Pfizer clinical trial that supposedly showed the shots to be 100% safe and effective. The company simply covered up the severe adverse events by kicking those participants out of the trial and/or suggesting without evidence that the deaths had nothing to do with the experiment.

Remember, the CDC announced a few weeks ago that it had finally study a potential association between the COVID shots and strokes. Well, it turns out the agency had the opportunity to study it already in 2020 before a single human being outside the trial was injected. “Patient no. 11621327” was more than a mere number. He was a human being found dead from a stroke in his apartment just three days after the second dose. Typically, with a novel product in trial, any death – even one not so sudden – makes the product suspect until it is proven innocent. Yet in this case, Pfizer simply dismissed the death as not related to the vaccine, just as the company did with Patient #11521497, who died 20 days later from cardiac arrest.

The article also provides more details on the Buenos Aires trial site, the largest one in the world, in which attorney Augusto Roux was severely injured with pericarditis and liver damage. Instead of being recorded as a severe adverse event, he was marked as having had COVID (even though he tested negative) and was summarily removed from the trial. Roux was on my podcast last July and told me Pfizer refused to help treat his injury because officials felt it had nothing to do with the vaccine, and insurance also refused to pay for treatment because the insurance company blamed it on him willingly joining the trial.

Die Welt reports that on Aug. 31, 2020, 53 of those in the trial in Buenos Aires were unblinded and removed from the trial against the protocol, which calls for this only “in emergencies” (unless this was indeed an emergency!). By the end of the second dose, a further 200 individuals were removed from the trial, meaning that overall, more than 250 of the original 1231 participants were terminated, thereby making the entirety of the data from the largest trial site irrelevant to use in the final trial results.

Overall, 21 participants in Pfizer’s phase 3 trial died, as compared to 17 in the control group before they were unblinded, which should have been a red flag before the shot ever took off. Pfizer claimed there was no evidence anyone died from the vaccine, but after it’s been revealed that a number of people in the trial suffered heart ailments and strokes, the company’s defense holds no water. Yet here we are, over two years later, and the shots are still on the market, promoted like manna from heaven, and even mandated in most hospitals and universities, including in red states. How is this not the top public policy issue of our day?

Consider the following from a public policy standpoint. Pfizer gets the government to pony up billions in taxpayer dollars for the shots, several billion more to promote, advertise, distribute, and mandate them on every human being alive – all while absolving Pfizer of liability. So how do we know the shots are safe? Who gets to monitor the clinical trial? The very manufacturer that was absolved of liability by the government! The Die Welt article even mentions that Pfizer pushed through a liability waiver on its contract not just for negligence, but also for “fraud or bad faith on the part of Pfizer itself.”

Pfizer responded to the Die Welt reporter by asserting that, “Regulatory authorities around the world have approved our Covid-19 vaccine. These approvals are based on a robust and independent assessment of the scientific data on quality, safety, and efficacy, including the phase 3 clinical trial.” Sure, authorities guaranteed the company endless funding, marketing, mandates, and indemnity so that Pfizer would have no incentive to even release the true results of its trial, much less make the product better.

How can this continue to go on after all we know?

Yet in all honesty, this year’s legislative sessions in red states have been an utter disgrace – with medical freedom not even being on the back burner of policy issues. The few brave legislators who seek to impose some sort of accountability on the state departments of health for promoting and mandating these shots are summarily shouted down. Florida is the only state where officials are holding Pfizer accountable with the convening of a grand jury. Just last week, the Florida Department of Health sent an alert to doctors warning them to inform anyone inquiring about the COVID shots about the adverse events reported to the CDC’s VAERS. Where are the other red states? Why is Ron DeSantis the only governor who values the Nuremberg Code?

What is it going to take to give this issue the prominence it deserves so that the policies and laws reflect the human toll these odious policies have taken on humanity? How many more people need to die for a lie? Remember, a study from Thailand showed that 29% of young males in the study sample suffered some form of subclinical heart damage whether they experienced symptoms or not. We have potentially hundreds of millions of people in the world who are ticking time bombs and in need of the best research, diagnostics, and treatment.

Amid all the existential threats to our security, civilization, culture, and economy – and there are certainly many – can you think of anything that matches the severity of this issue? From died suddenly to plummeting birth rates, how is the vaccine issue not the top concern of all public policy, given that it was injected in 5.5 billion people and officials are on the cusp of approving more mRNAs? So we’re now supposed to believe Moderna’s own published phase 3 trial results of its RSV shot that it’s 84% effective and absolutely no serious adverse events occurred? Within months, if we don’t stop it, this shot will be in the arms of every senior and then, eventually, in the arms of every newborn baby.

After Pfizer purposely fabricated its clinical trial, the company must now be on the hook for a different sort of trial – one Steve Deace and I lay out in “Rise of the Fourth Reich.” Unless we begin holding pharma companies accountable and erecting legal firewalls to protect the people from their endless experimentation, they will do this again and again.

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Report: Norfolk Southern has greased politicians’ hands to the tune of nearly $100 million since 1990

By: JOSEPH MACKINNON | February 21, 2023

**Photo by Nick Hagen/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images**

Norfolk Southern Railway, the company responsible for over half of the hazmat rail incidents in 2022 and the catastrophic Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, has spent a great deal of money over the past 30 years to win favor amongst America’s political elites. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R), Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), the Environmental Protection Agency, and others have suggested that Norfolk Southern will be held accountable for the cleanup in East Palestine, Ohio; now home an ecological disaster that has killed wildlife, turned the sky black, and threatened the residents’ ways of life.

Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, accountable the nation’s system of railroads and the regulation of its railways, repeated the claim that those responsible or possibly malfeasant will be held accountable, suggesting also that he would turn to Congress for help in tackling violators amongst the rail companies, reported Fortune.

A new report from the New Republic suggested that some of those expected to help hold Norfolk Southern responsible are the same that have gladly taken its money in the past. The rail industry has spent nearly $800 million to lobby the government that is supposed to oversee them since 1998. According to Open Secrets, Norfolk Southern spent $1.8 million lobbying last year and $1.6 million the year before. Since 1998, it has spent over $79 million on lobbying efforts and $16,948,996 on political contributions. That money has made its way to both sides of the aisle.

The company favored Democratic congressional candidates 55.27% to 44.72%, but doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to persons of all political persuasions who may one day be called to hold it accountable. Senatorial and congressional campaign committees for both parties received money from the railway last year — as did 71 Democrats and 62 Republicans in Congress.

For instance, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) received $10,000 from Norfolk Southern last year, as did leftist Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell received $5,000 as did Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.). Almost half of the crowded House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure pocketed money from Norfolk Southern.

The relationship that the government — which the residents of East Palestine have been told will ensure justice is meted out — has with the company is incestuous for reasons beyond money. 75% of the company’s lobbyists last year previously held government positions.

TheBlaze previously reported that Norfolk Southern Railroad just celebrated “double-digit percentage growth in revenue and … record revenue and operating income,” noting in its end-of-year financial report that it had raked in $12.7 billion in 2022, up 14% over the previous year. The railway managed this despite reportedly accounting for over half the hazmat damages involving rail transportation in the U.S. last year.

The New York Times reported that the rate of accidents on the company’s railway has increased in each of the last four years.

Albers, Illinois, for instance, was swept by 20,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate monomer, a combustible liquid, on Sept. 19, 2022, after a Norfolk Southern derailment. Sandusky, Ohio, similarly was streaked with spillage, this time 20,000 gallons of paraffin wax in October 2022.

Bank of America analyst Ken Hoexter indicated last week that in the case of the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern disaster in Ohio, the railway may have to pay $40 million to $50 million in a “casualty charge,” reported FreightWaves. However, on the top end, this would equal roughly 1.7% of its 2022 profits and amount to a drop in the bucket.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Presidents’ Day

A.F. BRANCO | on February 22, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-presidents-day/

Biden goes to Ukraine while Trump heads to the East Palestine Ohio Disaster. Who’s putting America first?

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DAVID HARSANYI Op-ed: We Don’t Need A ‘National Divorce,’ We Need More Federalism

DAVID HARSANYI | FEBRUARY 21, 2023

Caning of Charles Sumner — **Get real.**

Author David Harsanyi profile

DAVID HARSANYI

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Marjorie Taylor Greene says the country needs a national divorce. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” she tweeted. “Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

Generally speaking, I’m sympathetic to the idea that the political left is unable to accept a truly diverse nation. Virtually every legislative policy proposal from modern Democrats — and every policy issued by edict — strengthens federal power and economic control over states. Modern Democrats are champions of direct democracy, an effort to undercut the choices of local communities and individuals. When they don’t get their way, the D.C. bureaucracy steps in to circumvent the will of states. And when courts stop them, Democrats work to delegitimize and weaken the judiciary. Just this week, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., argued states should simply disregard the Supreme Court when they don’t agree with a decision. Ignoring the division of power is far more likely to cause a national schism than any Greene tweet.

None of that means a “national divorce” — really succession, since other states are unlikely to concede to a split — isn’t a reckless thing for someone who took a vow to defend the Constitution to advocate. Even if we took a moment to seriously contemplate the idea, how would it be achieved? We aren’t separated ideologically into large geographic regions or even states, but rather urban, suburban, and rural areas. Conservatives like to share that map showing virtually the entire country painted in electoral red — and it matters more than Democrats like to admit. But we can’t discount that density also matters. A “national divorce” would create even smaller minorities and divisions, but little difference in the way of policy. (How are the Greenes going to shrink the government when they won’t even reform entitlements?)

For that matter, where will Greene’s Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020 and now has two left-wing senators, end up in this split? How about purple states like Virginia or New Hampshire? Will we have 50 separate referendums? Will there be population exchanges like the one India and Pakistan undertook in 1947? If history is any indication, it’s the kind of situation that leads to political violence and economic ruin.

And, you know, you already have the freedom to move about the nation and find a place that suits your lifestyle and politics. That’s one of the reasons we’re a place that has room for a progressive vegan, the evangelical conservative farmer, the suburban moderate, and everyone in between.

During the past 42 years, the federal government has been divided for 30 of them. Over the past three presidencies, the president’s party lost at least one house after only two years. The instinct of the American public is to split power. The organic state of a divided nation is glorious gridlock — which is why the 10th Amendment exists. Now, it’s also true that leftists struggle with the notion of letting people in red states think, speak, and live in ways they dislike. There is a national political and cultural effort to homogenize us. And when Republicans appropriate the existing local power Democrats have used for decades to implement their own choices — as Ron DeSantis has done in Florida — leftists act as if we’re on the precipice of a dictatorship. But they have no power to stop him. Only Florida voters do. This is why federalism exists. It is why some states thrive and others don’t. And federalism is not only a more desirable solution than breaking the country into two, but also far more feasible.

It’s also worth noting that political divisions aren’t static. People can be persuaded. Events change perceptions. It is very likely that our kids and grandkids are going to face a different set of problems and divisions. Are we going to split into four in 50 years?

None of this is to argue there aren’t serious problems facing the nation, but Big Tech’s relentless highlighting of every decisive moment, every rabid voice, and every radical position clouds our view of reality. The nastier and crazier you pretend to be, the more misleading your tweets, and the more partisan you act, the more followers you can expect. The incentive of social media success is corrosive. Most of it just exacerbates political divisions.

In the real world, you probably live in proximity to plenty of people with different religious, cultural, and ideological values, yet, despite what you’ve heard, we’re a nation with negligible political violence. In many ways, despite the mess politicians have made, our lives are better than ever. Let’s keep it that way.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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Biden Declares U.S. Will Sustain War In Eastern Europe Indefinitely, Against Americans’ Wishes

BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 21, 2023

Less than 24 hours after his staged trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, President Joe Biden told thousands of spectators in Warsaw, Poland, that he plans to indefinitely squander U.S. taxpayer dollars on a proxy war, despite Americans indicating they oppose this involvement.

“Our support for Ukraine will not waver, NATO will not be divided, and we will not tire,” Biden yelled on Tuesday during his occasionally incoherent remarks.

The event was promoted as a somber affair to mark one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Biden’s speech, however, kicked off with the light-hearted air of a campaign stop, featuring background music by the Foo Fighters and Coldplay and photo opportunities with children waving American, Polish, and Ukrainian flags.

Back home, Americans plagued with sky-high inflation, a growing border crisis, and hazardous chemical spills are not as enthused by Biden’s words. Less than half of Americans support shipping weapons and cash to the Eastern European country, especially because, with no oversight, those funds are lining the pockets of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose regime is plagued with allegations of corruption.

Despite Americans’ opposition to prolonging an overseas war, Biden falsely claimed to his audience in Poland that Americans “are united in our resolve” to sponsor the Zelensky regime “for as long as it takes.”

Biden cited showy Ukraine flag virtue-signaling campaigns and Congress’s assistance in sending $113 billion taxpayer dollars and counting to Zelenksy as proof that Americans want to keep handing over blank checks to a foreign government.

“All across my country, in big cities and small towns, Ukrainian flags fly from American homes. Over the past year, Democrats and Republicans in the United States Congress have come together to stand for freedom. That’s who Americans are, that’s what Americans do,” Biden said.

In a full embrace of the uniparty’s interventionist agenda, Biden claimed this commitment to “the people of Ukraine and the future of Ukraine” is rooted in the belief that Ukraine should be a “free, sovereign, and democratic” nation. “There’s no sweeter word than freedom. There is no nobler goal than freedom. There’s no higher aspiration than freedom. Americans know that, and you know it,” Biden said.

While his homeland crumbles, Biden touts dragging the U.S. into a global war in the name of advancing “democracy” and “sovereignty” overseas with no word about the negotiations required for de-escalation. On the contrary, Biden said the only end to this war he will accept is Russia ceasing its invasion, something President Vladimir Putin said he doesn’t plan to do.

“If Russia stopped invading Ukraine, it would end the war. If Ukraine stopped defending itself against Russia, [it] would be the end of Ukraine,” Biden said.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

JORDAN BOYD

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The ‘Twitter Files’ Reveal Big Tech’s Unholy Alliance with the Feds Exists to Control You

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | FEBRUARY 21, 2023

close-up of girl with blue duct tape covering her mouth — **The Twitter Files show how the FBI deputized Twitter to conduct illegal censorship of American citizens and undermine the First Amendment.**

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

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The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on Feb. 7, 2023.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the “Twitter Files” by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The “Twitter Files” story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the “Twitter Files” reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should also prod us to action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair elections, and indeed our country.

After Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, he fired a slew of useless or insubordinate employees, instituted new content moderation policies, and tried to reform a woke corporate culture that bordered (and still borders) on parody. In the process, Musk coordinated with Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a series of stories based on internal Twitter documents related to an array of major political events going back years:

the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Twitter’s secret policy of shadowbanning,
President Trump’s suspension from Twitter after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot,
the co-opting of Twitter by the FBI to suppress “election disinformation” ahead of the 2020 election,
Twitter’s involvement in a Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign,
its silencing of dissent from the official Covid narrative,
its complicity in the Russiagate hoax,
and its gradual capitulation to the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community — with the FBI as a go-between — in content moderation.

As Taibbi has written, the “Twitter Files” “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government — from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

The “Twitter Files” contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider just three installments and their related implications: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump, and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly hostile to the First Amendment.

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

On Oct. 14, 2020, the New York Post published its first major exposé based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had been dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked up. It was the first of several stories detailing Biden family corruption and revealing the close involvement of Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business ventures in the years during and after Biden’s vice presidency. Hunter, although doing no real work, was making tens of millions of dollars from foreign companies in places like Ukraine and China. The Post’s bombshell reporting shined a bright light on what was happening.

According to the emails on the laptop, Hunter introduced then-Vice President Biden to a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter (who had no credentials or experience in the energy business) up to $50,000 a month to sit on its board. Soon after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating the company.

In an earlier email, a top Burisma executive asked Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” to benefit the company. The Post’s ensuing stories revealed more of the same: a shocking level of corruption and influence-peddling by Hunter Biden, whose emails suggest his father was closely connected to his overseas business ventures. Indeed, those ventures appear to consist entirely of Hunter providing access to Joe Biden.

Twitter did everything in its power to suppress the Biden story. It removed links to the Post’s reporting, appended warnings that they might be “unsafe,” and prevented users from sharing them via direct message — a restriction previously reserved for child pornography and other extreme cases. In an extraordinary step, Twitter also locked the Post’s account and the accounts of people who shared links to its reporting, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. These actions were justified under the pretext that the stories violated Twitter’s hacked-materials policy, even though there was no evidence, then or now, that anything on the laptop was hacked.

Twitter executives at the highest levels were directly involved in these decisions. Former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde, the company’s chief censor, played a key role, as did former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth. Oddly, all this seems to have been done without the knowledge of Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey. And it was done despite internal pushback from other departments.

“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” wrote a Twitter communications executive in an email to Gadde and Roth. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” asked former VP of global communications Brandon Borman. His question was answered by Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker — a former top lawyer for the FBI and the most powerful member of a growing cadre of former FBI employees working at Twitter — who said that “caution is warranted” and that some facts “indicate the materials may have been hacked.”

But there were no such facts, as Baker and other top Twitter executives knew at the time. The laptop was exactly what the Post said it was, and every fact the Post reported was accurate. Other major media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post would begrudgingly admit as much 18 months later, after Joe Biden was ensconced in the White House.

If there were no hacked materials in the Post’s reporting, why did Twitter immediately react as if there were? Because long before the Post published its first laptop story, there had been an organized effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden. The laptop, after all, had been in federal custody since the previous December, when the FBI seized it from the computer repair shop. So the FBI knew very well that it contained evidence of straightforward criminal activity (such as illicit drug use) as well as of corruption and influence-peddling.

The evening before the Post ran its first story on the laptop, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Roth at Twitter through a special one-way communications channel the FBI had established with the company. For months, the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies had been priming Roth to dismiss news reports about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election as “hack-and-leak” operations by state actors. They had done the same thing with Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much to Joe Rogan in an August 2022 podcast.

As Michael Shellenberger reported in the seventh installment of the “Twitter Files,” the FBI repeatedly asked Roth and others at Twitter about foreign influence operations on the platform and were repeatedly told there were none of any significance. The FBI also routinely pressured Twitter to hand over data outside the normal search warrant process, which Twitter at first resisted.

In July 2020, Chan arranged for Twitter executives to get top secret security clearances so the FBI could share intelligence about possible threats to the upcoming presidential election. The next month, Chan sent Roth information about a Russian hacking group called APT28. Roth later said that when the Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop broke, “It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.” Even though there was never any evidence that anything on the laptop was hacked, Roth reacted to it just as the FBI had conditioned him to do, using the company’s hacked-materials policy to suppress the story as soon as it appeared, just as the agency suggested it would, less than a month before the election.

Suspending the President

The erosion of Twitter’s content moderation standards would continue after the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, reaching its apogee on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol riot. That is when Twitter made the extraordinary decision to suspend President Trump, even though he had not violated any Twitter policies.

As the “Twitter Files” show, the suspension came amid ongoing interactions with federal agencies — interactions that were increasing in frequency in the months leading up to the 2020 election, during which Roth was meeting weekly with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As the election neared, Twitter’s unevenly applied, rules-based content moderation policies would steadily deteriorate.

Content moderation on Twitter had always been an unstable mix of automatic enforcement of rules and subjective interventions by top executives, most of whom used Twitter’s censorship tools to diminish the reach of Trump and others on the right through shadowbanning and other means. But that was changing. As Taibbi wrote in the third installment of the “Twitter Files”:

As the election approached, senior executives — perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed — increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of ‘vios’ [violations] as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.

After Jan. 6, Twitter jettisoned even the appearance of a rules-based moderation policy, suspending Trump for a pair of tweets that top executives falsely claimed were violations of Twitter’s terms of service. The first, sent early in the morning on Jan. 8, stated: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” The second, sent about an hour later, simply stated that Trump would not be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

That same day, key Twitter staffers correctly determined that Trump’s tweets did not constitute incitement of violence or violate any other Twitter policies. But pressure kept building from people like Gadde, who wanted to know whether the tweets amounted to “coded incitement to further violence.” Some suggested that Trump’s first tweet might have violated the company’s policy on the glorification of violence. Internal discussions then took an even more bizarre turn. Members of Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team” reportedly viewed Trump “as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”

Later on the afternoon of Jan. 8, Twitter announced Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” — a nonsense phrase that corresponded to no written Twitter policy. The suspension of a sitting head of state was unprecedented. Twitter had never taken such a step, even with heads of state in Nigeria and Ethiopia who actually had incited violence. Internal deliberations unveiled by the “Twitter Files” show that Trump’s suspension was partly justified based on the “overall context and narrative” of Trump’s words and actions — as one executive put it — “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

That is, it was not anything Trump said or did; it was that Twitter’s censors wanted to blame the president for everything that happened on Jan. 6 and remove him from the platform. To do that, they were willing to shift the entire intellectual framework of content moderation from the enforcement of objective rules to the consideration of “context and narrative,” thereby allowing executives to engage in what amounts to viewpoint discrimination.

Private companies, of course, for the most part have the right to engage in viewpoint discrimination — something the government is prohibited from doing by the First Amendment. The problem is that when Twitter suspended Trump, it was operating less like a private company than like an extension of the federal government.

***

Among the most shocking revelations of the “Twitter Files” is the extent to which federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies came to view Twitter as a tool for censorship and narrative control. In part six of the “Twitter Files,” Taibbi chronicles the “constant and pervasive” contact between the FBI and Twitter after January 2020, “as if [Twitter] were a subsidiary.” In particular, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security wanted Twitter to censor tweets and lock accounts it believed were engaged in “election misinformation,” and would regularly send the company content it had pre-flagged for moderation, essentially dragooning Twitter into what would otherwise be illegal government censorship. Taibbi calls it a “master-canine” relationship. When requests for censorship came in from the feds, Twitter obediently complied — even when the tweets in question were clearly jokes or posted on accounts with few followers.

Some Twitter executives were unsure what to make of this relationship. Policy Director Nick Pickles at one point asked how he should refer to the company’s cooperation with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, suggesting it be described in terms of “partnerships.” Time and again, federal agencies stressed the need for close collaboration with their “private sector partners,” using the alleged interference by Russia in the 2016 election as the pretext for a massive government surveillance and censorship regime operating from inside Twitter.

Requests for content moderation, which increasingly resembled demands, came not only from the FBI and DHS, but also from a tangled web of other federal agencies, contractors, and government-affiliated think tanks such as the Election Integrity Project at Stanford University. As Taibbi writes, the lines between government and its “partners” in this effort were “so blurred as to be meaningless.”

The Deputization of Twitter

After the 2016 election, both Twitter and Facebook faced pressure from Democrats and their media allies to root out Russian “election meddling” under the thoroughly debunked theory that a Moscow-based social media influence operation was responsible for Trump’s election victory. In reality, Russia’s supposed meddling amounted to a minuscule ad buy on Facebook and a handful of Twitter bots. But the truth was not acceptable to Democrats, the media, or the anti-Trump federal bureaucracy.

In 2017, Twitter came under tremendous pressure to “keep producing material” on Russian interference, and in response it created a Russia Task Force to hunt for accounts tied to Moscow’s Internet Research Agency. The task force did not find much. Out of some 2,700 accounts reviewed, only two came back as significant, and one of those was Russia Today, a state-backed news outlet.

But in the face of bad press and threats from Democrats in Congress, Twitter executives decided to go along with the official narrative and pretend they had a Russia problem. To placate Washington and avoid costly new regulations, they pledged to “work with [members of Congress] on their desire to legislate.” When someone in Congress leaked the list of the 2,700 accounts Twitter’s task force had reviewed, the media exploded with stories suggesting that Twitter was swarming with Russian bots — and Twitter continued to go along.

After that, as described by Taibbi, “This cycle — threatened legislation wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to [content] moderation asks — [came to] be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.”

Late in 2017, Twitter quietly adopted a new policy. In public, it would say that all content moderation took place “at [Twitter’s] sole discretion.” But its internal guidance would stipulate censorship of anything “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” Thus Twitter increasingly allowed the intelligence community, the State Department, and a dizzying array of federal and state agencies to submit content moderation requests through the FBI, which Chan suggested could function as “the belly button of the [U.S. government].” These requests would grow and intensify during the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to the 2020 election.

By 2020, there was a torrent of demands for censorship, sometimes with no explanation — just an Excel spreadsheet with a list of accounts to be banned. These demands poured in from FBI offices all over the country, overwhelming Twitter staff. Eventually the government would pay Twitter $3.4 million in compensation. It was a pittance considering the work Twitter did at the government’s behest, but the payment illustrated a stark reality: Twitter, a leading gatekeeper of the digital public square and arguably the most powerful social media platform in the world, had become a subcontractor for the U.S. intelligence community.

***

The “Twitter Files” have revealed or confirmed three important truths about social media and the deep state.

First, the entire concept of “content moderation” is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a virtual monopoly on public discourse in the digital era, we should stop thinking of them as private companies that can “do whatever they want,” as libertarians are fond of saying. The companies’ content moderation policies are at best a flimsy justification for banning or blocking whatever their executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a policy of pervasive government censorship.

Second, Twitter was taking marching orders from a deep state security apparatus that was created to fight terrorists, not to censor or manipulate public discourse. To the extent that the deep state is using social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to subvert the First Amendment and run information psy-ops on the American public, these companies have become malevolent government actors. As a policy matter, the hands-off, laissez-faire regulatory approach we have taken to them should come to an immediate end.

Third, the administrative state has metastasized into a destructive deep state that threatens to bring about the collapse of America’s constitutional system within our lifetimes. Emblematic of the threat is the fact that “the intelligence community” has proven itself incapable of not interfering in American elections. The FBI in particular has directly meddled in the last two presidential elections to a degree that should call into question its continued existence. Indeed, the FBI’s post-9/11 transformation from a law enforcement agency to a counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering agency with seemingly limitless remit has been a disaster for civil liberties and the First Amendment. We need either to impose radical reforms or scrap it entirely and start over.

The late great political scientist Angelo Codevilla argued that our response to 9/11 was completely wrong. Instead of erecting a sprawling security and surveillance apparatus to detect and disrupt potential terrorist plots, we should have issued an ultimatum to the regimes that were harboring Al Qaeda: You make war on these terrorists and bring them to justice or we will make war on you. The reason not to do what we did, Codevilla argued, is that a security and surveillance apparatus powerful and pervasive enough to do what we wanted it to do was incompatible with a free society. It might defeat the terrorists, but it would eventually be turned on the American people.

The “Twitter Files” leave little doubt that Codevilla’s prediction has come to pass. The question we face now is whether the American people and their elected representatives will fight back. The fate of the republic rests on the answer.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Ballon Popper One

A.F. BRANCO | on February 21, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-ballon-popper-one/

In an effort to save face over the China balloon disaster, Biden carelessly shoots down unidentified objects.

Biden Shoots Unidentified Objects — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

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California Democrat Arrested, Charged With Mail-In Ballot Fraud

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 20, 2023

A California city council member was arrested for allegedly committing election fraud.

Lodi City Council member Shakir Khan, a Democrat, was arrested on Thursday for multiple election fraud charges, including allegedly stashing 41 mail-in ballots at his home, falsifying voter registration documents, and pressuring residents to vote for him. Investigators claim, based partially on body cam footage of police interviews, that Khan registered 23 people to vote at his home address and used his phone number to register 47 people to vote.

And another Democrat,

Lodi City Council member Democrat Shakir Khan arrested on voter fraud charges related to 2020 Crime of the Century – stash of ballots found at his residence with fake voter registrations. pic.twitter.com/xWeWpUJy2K
— 🇺🇸RealRobert🇺🇸 (@Real_RobN) February 18, 2023

These charges stem from the 2020 election, when Khan was elected to the District 4 seat for the Lodi City Council.

Khan also faces charges in a separate criminal case with his brother that include illegal gambling, money laundering, tax evasion, and unemployment fraud. He’s due in court for another arraignment on that case on Feb. 21. Related to the election fraud charges, Khan was released from jail on Friday but must wear a tracking device and stay within California.

Local news reports it’s unclear whether Khan has resigned from the city council over the allegations. Still, the charges he faces related to election fraud are serious. That investigators allegedly found 41 sealed and completed mail-in ballots when searching Khan’s home proves how easy it is for nefarious actors to fix elections when unsupervised mail-in balloting is legal.

As previously reported, mail-in ballots pose a huge risk for election fraud. According to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission, 28.3 million mail-in ballots are still missing across the country from elections conducted between 2012 and 2018. Because there is no way to track these ballots, there is no way of knowing whether they were used fraudulently.

” federal Election Assistance Commission, 28.3 million mail-in ballots are still missing“..

Third-party partisan organizers can also take advantage of such a lax system by harvesting ballots (coaxing voters to fill out ballots on behalf of Democratic candidates, taking their ballots, and dropping them off at election offices), and they do. In fact, Khan allegedly engaged in ballot harvesting by pressuring District 4 residents to vote for him and filling out their ballots.

Requiring all voters who are able to cast their ballots in person would remedy many of the security weaknesses of mail-in balloting. If that were law in Khan’s case, he wouldn’t have been allegedly able to fill out 41 fraudulent mail-in ballots using fake names and addresses and deliver them to be counted. There would have to be actual people showing up at the polls, identifying themselves, and filling out each of their ballots.

Despite the obvious liabilities of switching to all-mail elections, California just became the eighth state to approve all-mail voting for its elections moving forward. As a result of such a disastrous change, expect more cases like Khan’s to spring up.

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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VICTORIA MARSHALL

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Biden’s New ‘Equity’ Executive Order Is Systemic Racism In Disguise

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | FEBRUARY 20, 2023

In a newly signed executive order designed to use federal agencies to forcibly guarantee equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity for Americans, President Joe Biden tacitly admitted his administration is collaborating with a prominent leftist group to advance neo-Marxism throughout the U.S. government.

Signed on Thursday, the order, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government,” seeks to expand the administration’s so-called “equity-advancing requirements for agencies.” Equity is a term regularly employed by leftists to cover up their true goal of dismissing merit and real equality in favor of discrimination on the basis of skin color.

A prime example of “equity” in action can be seen in Virginia, where several high schools in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties admitted to withholding National Merit awards from deserving students in order to avoid hurting the feelings of those not awarded. As The Federalist reported, “Asian American students are highly represented among the recipients, and some believe withholding the awards to be an act of racially motivated biases against Asian students.”

Under Biden’s new executive order, federal departments are instructed to embrace such ideology to construct a so-called “fair” and “inclusive” economy, which would include investing in areas where the administration claims federal policies have “historically impeded equal opportunity … in ways that mitigate economic displacement.”

Buried within the order, however, is a directive for federal agencies to implement what’s called the “Justice40 Initiative.” While the document doesn’t specify what the mission of Justice40 is, a quick trip to the group’s website reveals it to be nothing more than an effort by left-wing activists to advance neo-Marxist policies under the guise of “environmental justice.”

“The Justice40 promise seeks to create an equitable recovery for Americans facing challenges created by aging infrastructure, a frayed social safety net, natural disasters, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization’s website reads. “Justice40 must address inequities that hinder a sustainable, just society, and that disproportionately harm low-income and communities of color across America.”

What are they really?

They’re another neo-Marxist organization directing policy in the Biden Administration.

Plenty of clenched fists on their website to go around, but their leaders are more blatant in their commie sensibilities. 2 of them have a telling social media history. pic.twitter.com/BjvHKAQ1Ih
— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) February 19, 2023

Back in July 2021, Biden officially adopted Justice40’s stated goal of providing at least 40 percent of federal investments “in climate and clean energy” to these so-called “disadvantaged communities.” In other words, the administration is distributing taxpayer money to certain jurisdictions based on racial demographics.

The policy is eerily similar to Covid-related guidance the administration released in December 2021, in which health-care providers were advised to prioritize racial and ethnic minorities in the dissemination of Covid treatments such as monoclonal antibodies.

But it’s not just Justice40’s mission that’s tied to neo-Marixst ideology. Several of the group’s listed “movement leaders” have pushed policies and ideas embraced by radical leftist organizations such as Black Lives Matter. On her Twitter profile, Justice40 leader Cassia Herron proclaims she is a “lover” of “revolutions,” and has several posts calling to defund the police.

“We want to defund the police and distribution of wealth,” a July 7, 2020 tweet reads.

Also listed as a Justice40 “movement leader” is Jacqueline Patterson, who during Trump’s presidency in December 2020 seemingly compared the Covid jab rollout to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. government secretly conducted experiments on black American men for decades without informing them of viable treatment options. Over a year later, when Biden was in office, Patterson tweeted she was fully vaccinated “from the black batch” and boosted, adding that the risk of Covid “seemed worse with not getting vaccinated.”

The collaboration between the administration and Justice40 represents the latest nail in the coffin of legacy media’s narrative that Biden is some sort of unifying moderate who advances centrist policies. Shortly after his inauguration, for instance, Biden signed an executive order reversing the “Mexico City Policy,” which prevented nongovernmental entities receiving U.S. taxpayer money from using such funds to promote or perform abortions.

Moreover, America’s commander-in-chief has consistently issued racially divisive statements, such as comparing Republicans opposed to his party’s proposed takeover of U.S. elections to segregationists.

“So I ask every elected official in America, how do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” Biden asked during a January 2022 speech. “Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Joe Biden Fiddles with World War In Ukraine as U.S. Border, Railways Burn

BY: JOY PULLMANN | FEBRUARY 20, 2023

**Where is Biden as his country is in flames? Hiding from his crimes against Americans and our Constitution by urging atrocities in Ukraine.**

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JOY PULLMANN

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Americans received a pristine view of Democrats’ disastrous America-Last policies this morning as Joe Biden paid a surprise visit to Ukraine while his own country literally burns with manmade disasters he continues to inflame.

Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Agency denied any money to help clean up a burning chemical disaster zone in the Republican state of Ohio, but Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that Biden will get a blank check to slosh around hundreds of billions from U.S. taxpayers to prolong the carnage of war in Ukraine — and the profits from it from insane deficit spending that also threatens U.S. national security.

Not only is key U.S. infrastructure on fire stateside, but Biden, in violation of his oath of office, also set the U.S. border figuratively on fire immediately upon assuming the presidency by lifting former President Trump’s effective enforcement of U.S. national security laws. Cities and towns across the United States are overwhelmed with mass human trafficking and the outsourcing of U.S. border control to international drug cartels allied with the top U.S. foreign adversary, Red China.

It’s no surprise that American support for expanding the U.S. proxy war with Russia is declining. They can see that their neighbors have to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for health insurance even if they never see a doctor because they’re really paying off the health expenses of illegal migrants, and that their neighbors are dying from the fentanyl trafficked with the human flood of misery across the border.

And where is Biden as his country is in flames? Hiding from his crimes against Americans, our laws, and our Constitution by urging continued atrocities while doing a dog and pony show in Ukraine. While forcing his own people — and those whose migration keeps the cartels supplied with the billions to buy military-grade weaponry — to suffer murder, rape, and other heinous crimes, Biden is abroad encouraging ongoing violence in Ukraine.

War is hell, especially for the vulnerable — women, children, and the elderly. But Democrats and their military-industrial complex believe death, rape, starvation, and continued demolishing of Ukranian homes and towns are a worthy trade for a shiny new excuse to open U.S. coffers wide to high-dollar campaign donors with no oversight. It’s no coincidence, surely, the dollar spigots are also flooding toward the very same country that supplied millions to politically influence Biden’s family — and, according to his family, to influence Biden himself.

This is Joe Biden’s “mission accomplished” moment. Or, it would be, if the hapless and embarrassing George W. Bush were as patently evil as the Democrats running Biden.

Remember, six weeks after he invaded Iraq, Bush stood in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” U.S. troops remained in Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 more years, spending precious soldiers’ lives and trillions in American treasure to weaken our national security by distracting us from higher foreign policy priorities, such as China. Right after Bush gave the “Mission Accomplished” speech, Iraqi insurgents redoubled their efforts.

**U.S. Navy Photo by Photographer’s Mate Third Class Juan E. Diaz. Public domain / Wikimedia**

Democrats’ media mouthpieces may have controlled U.S. discourse so much that only the brave like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can point out the foolhardiness of tempting another world war by refusing to seek peace for Ukraine. But the rest of the world is not fooled. They’re aware that Democrats are weak, that they hate America, and that they are willing to sell the labor, security, and peace of their American brethren to the highest bidder.

Biden may be trying to look tough by visiting Ukraine weeks after allowing Chinese spy balloons to traverse the United States and then shooting down $6 hobby balloons with $400,000 missiles. But the only person he’s fooling is himself.

Biden’s weakness is the Democratic Party’s weakness is the U.S. foreign policy cabal’s weakness. And weakness invites aggression. Photo ops are not going to reduce the threat of a world war. Patently weak appearances by Biden in fact escalate the threat of world war. Seeking to de-escalate is the only prudent choice. We all had better pray someone with power figures that out before China and Russia continue to align against us. History tells what happens when leaders fiddle after setting their cities ablaze.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. Her many books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Doctor’s post celebrating abortion is so ghoulish that even pro-choice people turn against her: ‘A family value’

By: CHRIS ENLOE | February 20, 2023

**Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images**

An Indiana doctor went viral over the weekend after she bragged about providing abortions, leading many people who identify as “pro-choice” to question their stance.

Last Friday, Dr. Katie McHugh, a “queer OB/GYN,” posted a picture of herself holding a cannula — a device used in abortions to remove the tissue of the deceased unborn child from the womb — while boasting about providing abortion “care.”

“Happy Friday! #Abortion care is still legal in Indiana. We’re doing everything we can to keep it that way,” she tweeted. “#AbortionIsHealthcare — as well as a community priority, a family value, and a normal part of life!

“Abortion is moral, common, and it isn’t going away,” she claimed. “Neither are we.”

Happy Friday! #Abortion care is still legal in Indiana. We’re doing everything we can to keep it that way.#AbortionIsHealthcare – as well as a community priority, a family value, and a normal part of life!

Abortion is moral, common, and it isn’t going away.

Neither are we. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/B8ehep1wDi
— Katie McHugh, MD (she/her) (@KtMcH) February 17, 2023

The post, which received millions of views by Monday, generated a tidal wave of backlash.

Specifically, many people who identify as “pro-choice” — i.e., those who support abortion — spoke out against Dr. McHugh and her “creepy” post.

“Abortion should *never* be common and should *never* be celebrated. I say this as someone who’s against making it illegal. What an absolutely unnerving and creepy post,” one person said.
“Seeing how happy you are to kill babies makes me question my pro choice stance,” another person said.
“I’m largely pro-choice but I question if I’m on the right side of the argument when I see providers get excited to perform abortions. This is a very, very creepy post,” another person said.
“I’m pro-choice, not pro-abortion. A distinction I never felt the need to make until this recent — and yes creepy — Democrat/lefty embrace of abortion,” one person responded.
“All they wanted was safe, legal, and rare. Now we have ‘moral, common, and isn’t going away,'” another person observed.
“Why are you smiling with an abortion tool.. even in the most straight forward of circumstances it still isn’t smile worthy…” another person responded.

The sharp reaction, rather than drawing out a spirit of contrition, caused Dr. McHugh to dig her heels in.

“Despite the *many* hateful comments, I am proud to normalize #abortion care, smile at and for people needing help, and honor the people choosing abortion,” she responded.

“I celebrate the chance to honor people as they choose their lives, families, and futures,” she added.

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POLITICALLY INCORRECT FOR PRESIDENTS DAY

February 20, 2023

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF FEBRUARY 17, 2023

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Buttigieg downplays toxic train derailment disaster in Ohio and gets excoriated online

By: CARLOS GARCIA | February 16, 2023

**Image Source: Yahoo Finance YouTube video screenshot composite**

Transportation Department Director Pete Buttigieg was excoriated online for a short clip of his reaction to the environmental disaster from a train derailment in Ohio. Buttigieg appeared on Yahoo! Finance to tout the Biden administration’s policies to encourage electric vehicle use when he was asked how future derailments could be avoided.

“Look, rail safety is something that has evolved a lot over the years, but there’s clearly more that needs to be done because while this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly one thousand cases a year of a train derailing,” he said.

“Obviously, they have levels of severity,” Buttigieg added.

A short clip of his comments was posted to social media, where many thought it was insensitive of him to compare it to other derailment accidents.

Pete Buttigieg on East Palestine disaster:

"While this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing." pic.twitter.com/ZVcdRn5Vax
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 16, 2023

“Oh, I feel much better now,” responded Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri sarcastically.

“IT DOESN’T COST A DIME TO GIVE A DAMN. But these ciphers can’t be bothered to show up,” replied Dagen McDowell of Fox News.

“Oh, so according to the over-his-head mediocrity who was hired for the job he has solely because he’s gay, train derailments are pretty ordinary so there’s nothing to worry about. Sounds totally legit. Nothing to see there, I guess,” read a popular tweet from John Hawkins.

However, Buttigieg’s full comments extended beyond the short clip.

“Well, the most urgent thing right now is to make sure that these residents get the information that they need, they are concerned, they are frightened and with good reason. They had their lives upended through no fault of their own and now want to know if their homes, their neighborhoods, their schools are safe,” he responded.

“Obviously EPA, the administrators, have been doing great work on this on the ground today, a lot of this is a partnership between them and the state when it comes to things like testing the air, testing the water. But there’s a very important transportation safety side to this too. Now, the NTSB, National Transportation Safety Board, they are an independent body and I respect their independence and their leadership of the investigation right now,” Buttigieg continued.

“But our department supports that process, matter of fact we had people on the ground within hours of our Federal Rail Administration and our Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to support that investigation,” he said.

Residents in the area surrounding the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, have reported dead animals, sickness, and breathing problems from the toxic chemicals that were burned off by officials.

“We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” said one hazardous materials specialist.

Here’s the full interview with Buttigieg on Yahoo! Finance:

White House, Tesla partnership ‘a great opportunity,’ Sec. Buttigieg sayswww.youtube.com

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Political

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Georgia police officer who wrote ‘God designed marriage’ was forced out over Christian beliefs, attorneys say

By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter | February 17, 2023

Former Port Wentworth Police Officer Jacob Kersey seen in this undated photo. | Courtesy photo

Attorneys representing a former Georgia police officer who expressed his Christian beliefs on social media say he was forced out of his job because of religious discrimination.

Port Wentworth Police Officer Jacob Kersey resigned in January after being told by his supervisors he could be terminated for sharing his religious views on marriage.

Kersey, 19, was placed on paid administrative leave following his refusal to take down a Facebook post from two days earlier in which he paraphrased the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus.

“God designed marriage. Marriage refers to Christ and the church. That’s why there is no such thing as homosexual marriage,” he wrote.

According to attorneys with First Liberty Institute in Plano, Texas, Kersey was given a letter of notification that warned him he could be fired if he posted any more “offensive” content on social media.

After further meetings with leadership, attorneys say he realized that he faced a choice between compromising his deeply held religious beliefs or continuing as a police officer with the department. He resigned on Jan. 17.

Prior to his resignation, Kersey had been a police officer with Port Wentworth PD since May 2022.

In a letter sent Monday to Port Wentworth Mayor Gary Norton and Assistant Police Chief Major Bradwick Lee Sherrod, attorneys accused Port Wentworth of “unconstitutionally forcing Mr. Kersey out of his job because of his deeply held religious beliefs.”

“The Department’s actions send a message to Christians who hold traditional biblical beliefs about marriage that they are unwelcome as police officers or city employees,” the letter stated.

According to attorneys, in a meeting on Jan. 4 with Norton and Sherrod, Kersey was told that his post about his religious beliefs was the “same thing as saying the N-word and F— all those homosexuals.”

He was also told, according to the letter, that his free speech was “limited due to his position as … a police officer” and that Kersey “could not post things like that.”

After being placed on leave, attorneys say Kersey received a letter of notification from Sherrod explaining that while there was not “sufficient evidence” to terminate him, Kersey could be terminated “for any post on any of his private social media accounts or any other statement or action that could be perceived as offensive.”

Sherrod noted that Kersey’s posts and podcasts are “likely offensive” to certain communities and urged him to “take this situation as a learning lesson.”

Forced to choose between his private religious speech and the job he loved, attorneys say Kersey had no choice but to resign.

Stephanie Taub, senior counsel for First Liberty Institute, said not only does the city owe Kersey an apology, but they also need to create policies that protect the First Amendment rights of city employees.

“It is a blatant violation of state and federal civil rights laws to discriminate against someone for expressing their religious beliefs,” Taub said in a statement. “The city owes Jacob a public apology. And it needs to adopt policies that recognize the free speech and free exercise rights of its employees.

“Forcing Jacob to choose to either censor his private religious speech or remain employed as a police officer is simply unconstitutional.”

In early February, just days after Kersey resigned, Port Wentworth Police Chief Matt Libby announced his retirement in a brief letter.

Speaking with The Christian Post earlier this month, Kersey said he believes Libby was forced to resign.

“The police chief was forced to resign after my story made national headlines,” he inferred, “America wants to know why.”

In addition to demanding a public apology from the other members of the Port Wentworth police command staff, Kersey also wants to know when the city is going to address the story.

“What happened to me should never happen again — not in America and certainly not in Georgia,” he said.

Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ian.giatti@christianpost.com.

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Political, Spiritual

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McCarthy Begins to Build Case for Mayorkas Impeachment

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | FEBRUARY 17, 2023

Kevin McCarthy speaks at border press conference in Arizona — **‘This has got to stop,’ McCarthy said. ‘And it starts with the secretary of Homeland.’**

Author Tristan Justice profile

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

TUCSON, Ariz. — Kevin McCarthy began to build the case for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment this week with the California lawmaker’s first trip to the border as House speaker. Talking to reporters, with the southeast Arizona border wall serving as his backdrop, McCarthy outlined the myriad crises plaguing the nation due to unchecked migration and charged the DHS secretary with lying to the public.

“Our border, we don’t even have operational control of it anymore,” McCarthy said. “This is why I will continue to investigate what has gone wrong here and we will hold people accountable. And that includes Secretary Mayorkas.”

In an exclusive interview with The Federalist after the press conference, McCarthy offered no timeline for a potential impeachment inquiry and maintained that the process depends on what lawmakers find over the coming weeks.

“You never do impeachment for political purposes,” McCarthy said. “If something rises to that level,” he explained, “we will follow it wherever it goes.”

McCarthy led the congressional delegation with four GOP freshman, kicking off what will be a top priority for the new Republican majority under the second half of President Joe Biden’s term. Every House committee is expected to visit the southwest border in the ensuing months. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., already introduced an article of impeachment against the DHS chief on Feb. 1.

In November, McCarthy demanded that Mayorkas resign over the border crisis or face impeachment in the lower chamber once Republicans took over. Mayorkas has remained defiant while the cartels run rampant. A coalition of 21 attorneys general sent a letter to the Biden administration last week demanding that Mexican drug cartels be designated as terrorist organizations.

Days before the speaker’s border trip this week, DHS staffed up to face House impeachment proceedings, entering a multimillion-dollar contract with a liberal law firm that has a history of left-wing donations.

“You cannot tell us this is secure when more than 42 percent of gottaways come through here,” McCarthy said on Thursday. “You cannot tell us this border’s secure when now there is enough fentanyl in this country to kill every single American more than 20 times over.”

“This has got to stop,” the speaker added. “And it starts with the secretary of Homeland. Stop lying to the American public. Tell them the truth [about] what’s happening and change back the regulation that we had before so our border can be secure.”

The White House hit McCarthy’s border trip as a partisan publicity stunt with a Wednesday statement. “Solutions are what President Biden is focused on, and his is plan working,” said Ian Sams, a White House spokesman. “House Republicans would be wise to join him to work together to strengthen our immigration system and fund border security.”

Biden’s first border visit was a sanitized tour in January, with officials clearing the camps in El Paso before the president’s arrival. Biden proceeded to call on Congress to pass immigration reform at his annual State of the Union last week and claimed his border measures were working.

“We’ve launched a new border plan last month. Unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent as a consequence of that,” Biden said. “But American border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts.”

ACTS ON WHAT????????? Fund what???????? The Wall has been funded since Clinton. Finish the Wall. We’ve got the materials. Put it up.

Contrary to his claims the border is secure, data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows otherwise.

Law enforcement reported more than 156,000 migrant encounters in January. While lower than the record of nearly 252,000 encounters in December, 156,000 is still higher than the almost 155,000 in January last year and the 78,000 the same month in 2021 — and way higher than the less than 37,000 in FY 2020. In fact, it’s an all-time high for the coldest month of the year. Even bundled-up reporters shivered under cloudless skies in the high desert winds when lawmakers ran late on Thursday.

A Deadly Crisis

While the Biden administration tries to argue there’s nothing to see on the southern border, Alex Espinosa, the director of a funeral home 15 miles east of McCarthy’s press conference, says otherwise.

“During Trump’s administration, I picked up four border crossers,” Espinosa told The Federalist in his conference room overlooking the border wall. “Right now, I can’t even tell you how many. There’s more deaths. Way more deaths.”

Most, Espinosa said, die from exposure to the elements or fentanyl. He explained the numbers picked up “right after Biden won.”

“Never, never, never, ever have I seen it this bad,” Espinosa told The Federalist. “I’ve probably buried 40 kids.”

A reformed ex-convict himself, Espinosa, 61, served time behind bars for drug smuggling 30 years ago. He now hands out free Narcan, a medication known to save lives in the case of opioid overdose, at services, saying it has become a hot commodity. The local health department replenished his stockpile after it ran out during a single funeral for a recent 23-year-old who overdosed. His own son has also struggled with opioid addiction.

In Naco, a town on the border five miles south of Espinosa’s funeral home, locals were shy about the crisis. A ranch hand working in a field with a pair of day laborers from across the border offered only his first name, Greg, and said he often sees helicopter activity but described the overall area as tame. Another pair of women operating a local nonprofit in the community denied the area even faced issues.

Espinosa, however, who conducts the funerals for the border crisis victims, said locals often feel too intimidated to speak openly about the dangers their neighborhoods face. Despite his Mexican heritage, Espinosa has been tarred as a racist, and his truck was burned after he challenged the mayor of Douglas over the leader’s plans to declare the border town a sanctuary city.

“They need to finish the wall,” Espinosa said frankly, warning that until then, the area would not be safe to walk around at night.

McCarthy told The Federalist on Thursday at the conclusion of his congressional tour that DHS needs to complete the wall with modern technology as originally planned.

“You gotta finish this,” McCarthy said, pointing at the wall. “Finish the technology you haven’t hooked up — the lights, the sensors. There’s places in the wall that’s not done yet.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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Political

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Green New Water

A.F. BRANCO | on February 17, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-green-new-water/

Senator J.D. Vance says EPA should come to East Palestine Ohio and Dring the water.

East Palestine Water — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

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Teacher fired for refusing to conceal students’ gender transitions from parents: ‘I realized that I couldn’t be a Christian and a Teacher’

By: CANDACE HATHAWAY | February 15, 2023

**Jessica Tapia (Image Source: Fox News Digital video screenshot)**

A California school recently fired a Christian teacher after she refused to comply with the district’s policies that required her to conceal students’ gender transitions from parents, Fox News Digital reported.

Jessica Tapia, a former physical education teacher who worked at the Jurupa Unified School District in Jurupa Valley, California, informed the district that because of her religious beliefs, she would not be able to lie or withhold information regarding the wellbeing of children from their parents.

“Am I going to obey the district in the directive that are not lining up with … my own beliefs, convictions and faith? Or am I going to stay true …, choose my faith, choose to be obedient to … the way the Lord has called me to live. And so it was crazy to be in the position where I realized that I couldn’t be a Christian and a teacher,” Tapia told Fox News Digital.

The teacher explained that the school required her to refer to students by their preferred pronouns and withhold that information from their parents. She was also told to allow transgender students into the locker room that coincides with their chosen gender identity.

Tapia said the district told her that it would be discriminatory against transgender students not to allow biological boys into the female locker room.

“I was very clear with them. If the student has male genitals, I’m not letting them in the female locker room,” she said.

Tapia stated that, according to the school district, students have a right to privacy, even from their parents.

“If a student shares information regarding a pronoun preference or thinking they’re maybe the opposite gender of what they biologically are, if they share that information with a teacher, we are supposed to keep that info from parents in case the parent doesn’t know,” she explained.

Tapia noted that there were several issues with the gender policy.

“We’re talking [about] 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds,” Tapai added. “I don’t believe [kids] should have this ‘privacy’ to where their parents are being left in the dark about very pertinent information about their wellbeing.”

Tapia received a letter signed by the assistant superintendent of human resources, Daniel Brooks, informing her that the district would be unable to accommodate her religious exception request and that she would be dismissed from her position on January 31.

“Based on your religious beliefs, you cannot be dishonest with parents … If asked about a student’s gender identity by a parent, you cannot refer the parent to a counselor, defer the inquiry and suggest they speak with a student …, or otherwise deflect the parent’s inquiry,” the letter stated.

“The district cannot accommodate your religious beliefs that … prohibit you from maintaining a student’s gender identity and refraining from disclosing a student’s gender identity from his/her/their parent(s)/guardians,” the letter continued.

Tapia stated that she got into teaching to “make an impact” and to be “a light to [kids] possibly coming from very rough homes like I did when I was a child.”

“I don’t believe … that that’s how God’s calling us to love, by affirming those lies and confusion,” Tapia said. “I believe firmly that God created man and woman, and you are who he made you to be. And when someone has confusion about that, I believe that’s lies and confusion from the devil.”

The district denied Tapia’s claim that it discriminated against her based on religious beliefs.

Jurupa Unified School District told Fox News Digital, “The District denies the allegations raised by Ms. Tapia. The District takes seriously its obligation to accommodate its employee’s religious beliefs. Simultaneously, the District is obligated to comply with all local, state, and federal laws, including anti-discrimination laws and laws that protect students’ rights to privacy, which are in place to protect the nearly 2,500 employees and 18,000 students we serve. We cannot comment further on personnel matters.”

FIRED BECAUSE SHE REFUSED TO LIE!

Tapia told the news outlet that she plans to take legal action against the district.

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Education, Political

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Massie and other Republicans push bill that would terminate an entire Department

By: ALEX NITZBERG | February 15, 2023

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky has reintroduced a brief bill that would do away with the U.S. Department of Education.

“The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2023,” the text of the concise measure reads.

Massie contends that there is no constitutional authority for the existence of the department. “I have introduced a bill to terminate the Department of Education. There is no Constitutional authority for this federal bureaucracy to exist,” Massie tweeted.

I have introduced a bill to terminate the Department of Education.

There is no Constitutional authority for this federal bureaucracy to exist. pic.twitter.com/xKWHgPfVnq
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) February 14, 2023

The measure, which has been put forward in the past as well, is unlikely to pass because even if it clears the House where Republicans hold the majority, it will likely stall in the Senate.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said, according to a press release. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students. Schools should be accountable. Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school, or private school.”

Massie’s press release lists GOP Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Eric Burlison of Missouri, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Rich McCormick of Georgia, Mary Miller of Illinois, and Chip Roy of Texas as original cosponsors. Massie has tweeted thanks to other lawmakers for cosponsoring the bill, including, Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, Russ Fulcher of Idaho, and Mike Collins of Georgia.

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Archive for February, 2023

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 28, 2023

Alliance Securing Democracy

German Marshall Fund

The Election Integrity Partnership

Atlantic Council Project

Graphika

The Center for Internet Security

Clemson University

Defending Democracy Together

Other Academic Institutes

The Aspen Institute

The Global Disinformation Index

Global Engagement Center

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BY: ANONYMOUS | FEBRUARY 28, 2023

Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research

NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved

Yet Biden Administration Pushes Transgender ‘Care’

I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?

Growing Transgender Identification

Debate Among Medication Providers

Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria

This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.

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House GOP opens probe into Maryland woman’s rape, murder by alleged MS-13 member who crossed border as minor

Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on Twitter: @danimwallace.

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By: ALEX NITZBERG | February 27, 2023

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Daniel Horowitz | February 27, 2023

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By: CHRIS ENLOE | February 28, 2023

President Biden and Vice President Harris Deliver Remarks at a Black History Month Reception

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Not A Joke

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By: PAUL SACCA | February 26, 2023

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BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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By: Julio Rosas | February 27, 2023 3:00 PM

“We have to see them. Any one of those that needs a hospital visit and we’ve done that. We do it with pride…But what we need is a payer source for those individuals because we have nobody to bill. They have no resources and they’ve just continued to come in,” Trenschel explained.

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By: PAUL SACCA | February 26, 2023

Erin Brockovich demands government officials stop ‘gaslighting’ East Palestine, Ohio

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By: MICHELE BLOOD | February 26, 2023

Woody Harrelson Monologue – SNL

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By: MICHELE BLOOD | February 25, 2023

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A.F. Branco cartoon – Classless

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Child’s Play

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By: JOSEPH MACKINNON | February 24, 2023

Video shows Flagler County school employee attacked by student over Nintendo Switchyoutu.be

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BY: ELAINE DONNELLY | FEBRUARY 24, 2023

Biden’s regulations do not protect or even mention rights of religious liberty for chaplains and people of faith. Nor do they provide options for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who object to transgender ideology on moral or ethical grounds.

Elaine Donnelly is President of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that reports on and analyzes military and social issues.